Sometimes the Muse is a chatterbox.
Sat 2005-07-23 21:23:47 (in context)
- 45,294 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 50.50 hrs. revised
And She won't always stick to the subject at hand. I mean, I told Her I need to write Chapter 7, right? But nooooooo.
I woke up early, what with all this 95+ degree heat going around, and lay there between 6:30 and 8:30 trying to get back to sleep. Not without some success, of course--I can sleep all day if I'm really persistent. What can I say? It's a gift. Anyway, I kept trying to think about Chapter 7 as I fell back asleep.
Chapter 7, according to the current chapter outline, has a lot going on. At the end of the previous chapter, Brian's reunion with Amy leads to a disturbing revelation of something seriously wrong. So he'll spend most of the next chapter avoiding Amy and, with her, any recurrence of the problem. He avoids Todd, too, because Todd just keeps harping on it. Finally, Brian'll try to run away, but of course he can't get far from the water before he starts his fish-out-of-water act. So he comes back and walks in on Russ being an ass to Amy, and he totally loses it, like in the cafeteria but worse, nearly killing his housemate. So what does he do when he realizes what he's done? That's right. He runs away again.
That's a whole heckalotta maudlin "OMGwhathaveIdone" purplage. What keeps it from drowning in self-pity is, it'll be the first of several chapters, occurring with increasing frequency throughout the rest of the novel, that's written from Amy's first-person point of view.
But that leaves another problem. Status at beginning of chapter: Brian no longer trusts himself around Amy. Status at end of chapter: Brian no longer trusts himself around anyone. A perfectly valid shift for a chapter to provide, but the first status happens too soon after Amy's arrival, and the latter happens without even a nod towards any sort of realistic idea of incremental change.
In other words, this is a chapter in which very little happens at too fast a pace.
So I invited the Muse to mull over it with me while I was usefully half-asleep. But did She? Oh no. Wouldn't even give it a thought. Instead, she's all like, "OK, so, after Goblet of Fire, Rita Skeeter can't do anything, right? But, get this, she's taking on journalism apprentices, OK, and one of them will become Harry's next journalistic nemesis!"
Which would be great if I wanted to write Harry Potter fanfic. But, see, I'm not.
Still, though the Muse may be a chatterbox, a writer ignores Her at her peril. I've filed it away for later abstraction. I'm thinking I may actually have the basis for a cyberpunkish story involving beyond-the-grave vengeance and a virus that gets spread via the written word. So there's that. And then there's a dream I had before that which has given me the premise for another novel in the "book detective" series. Which is all very cool, of course, given the ideal of inventing new story ideas every day.
But.
It's not Chapter Seven, dammit!
Better luck tomorrow, I'm sure. Bridget and I are doing coffee at Cafe Bravo's; doubtless I'll brute-force my way into a solution.