Will Write For Food
Thu 2005-08-25 22:31:38 (in context)
- 46,465 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 75.25 hrs. revised
Work on the novel today consisted mainly of reworking the bit right before the big sex scene. Said sex scene is still languishing at the halfway point. If you want to put it in terms of bases, we've hit home base but the crowd hasn't started cheering yet. There are some plot points to visit yet, some physical and some emotional, and I'm still pondering how to go about it. So I'm doing a lot of imagining, rewinding, re-imagining, blushing and humming with embarrassment, leg-crossing, and then more imagining, all the while getting distracted by later events in the book and how they might go.
Look, this would be easier if I were writing porn and only wanted to make the reader sweat. But what I'm doing here is mentally positioning characters for later events. The scripting has to be more precise. At the same time, of course, it needs to read naturally.
So what I did today was work with the bit of dialogue and its stage directions ramping up to the sexy stuff. It had been moving way too fast, resulting in the impression that the author got bored with the talking and slipped the characters aphrodesiacs so they'd just get on with it. After today's work, the symbolic marriage conversation seems to flow better. It's a lot more poignant, more desperate, more nicely full of fearful pauses, giving what follows the weight of a last chance.
Then again, it could still be utter crap. I've only got my own word for it, and--ha ha--I'm an unreliable narrator. Ha ha. Still, my hope is that I've got it to a point where tomorrow when I reread from the beginning of Chapter 9 I'll know where to go next.
In other news, I skeined up a length of the silk/mylar goodness discussed recently. (Photos of spinning projects will probably be uploaded Saturday, Circuit City willing.) Also, I biked around Boulder with John's T-Mobile Sidekick II, snapping photos of favorite eateries and writing up quickie reviews of them for NearLocal to earn the current promotional restaurant gift certificate. That's right, folks. "Will Work For Food." Or, at least, for $25 off the next time John and I and friends go stuff ourselves silly at Conor's.