Procrastination in Layers

So, first off, hey guys!  Long time, no see, sorry about that.  January was filled with breakneck speed catch up after the holidays, followed by sickness riddled February, which is drying out into a hopefully sickness-free March.  Blogging was so far down on the totem pole of things I had energy for that it was less than a speck of dust.

But I’m semi-back now, so this space will be getting some new posts here and there.

Now, on to the updates.  The first draft is complete.  It is an ugly little thing I love and abhor with the same breath.  I struggled for an entire month with lung phlegm and a handful of chapters from a new character’s POV that, eventually, had to be done away with.  It went the way of the loogie, in other words.  Not because the chapters were bad (although, yes, they were bad) or because they were unnecessary, but because they just do not fit right now.  Like champagne and wine glasses at a table full of moonshine in mason jars, these chapters refused to work with the overall ambiance.  Sucks, yes, but they may be useful later in the next book somehow, so I’m not totally bummed about the discovery.

So, I am now on to editing everything else, which is my favorite part of the process anyway, but I am finding way more landmines I left for myself than I remember creating.  See, when I’m in the thick of creating I will go as far as an idea carries me, and if it stops being interesting I will stop, mid-sentence more often than not, and then throw in a note to my future editing self.

Mostly, these notes consist of bored now, moving on to something else, deal with this later.  Or, asdfghjkl omgwtfidk where I’m going with this, figure it out in editing.  And, the always lovely, HAHAHAHAHAHAH I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING IT SUCKS TO BE YOU READING THIS LATER.

It’s times like these that I really dislike my past writing self.  I can be such a whiny, thoughtless, self-centered procrastinator.  Why do I never think of my editing self with compassion or care?  Why must I create unnecessary tripwires that send editor-me face first into a mud pit?

The short answer is because writer-me thinks it’s funny.  Writer-me takes joy in being an utter brat.  Writer-me is often sleep deprived, under caffeinated, under inebriated, and stretched thin upstairs so the thought of being a prick, even to my future self, is enough to keep writer-me moving forward with the creation process.  Because creating is hard.  It hurts.  It takes more than it gives, leaving me wrung out and with the sense of having been hollowed.

And so procrastinating then leads to procrastinating now.  I’m working with chapter six and I really, really, with the fire of a billion suns, hate chapter six.  It’s a pivotal chapter.  It’s the first domino of a really bad choice that leads into the epic free fall of other bad decisions that lead to oh crap situations that make the rest of the book fun.  It’s necessary.  It’s needed.

And I want to set it on fire.  Or blast it into space.  Or throw it off the edge of a cliff and listen to it scream on the way down.

But I can’t bring myself to delete it.

So I went to a different page and wrote a blog post that I’ve been procrastinating for two months.

Oh, the irony and layers.