I had a slight girlie moment of panic last night that led to a night of insomnia in which I was composing haikus instead of sleeping. Totally normal, right?
My moment of panic stemmed from the ten day trip I'm going to be embarking upon on Thursday. Yes, this Thursday. This trip includes four cities, two weddings (one of which I am in), and me in a bathing suit in a week from now, oh my god. Yes, this is one intense trip! It's going to be ridiculously awesome, and I'm going to see most of my very best friends, including my middle sister, over the course of the next ten days. However, I've been avoiding planning for it, meaning making lists of things to make sure I take and leave. Like take my gps for driving around L.A. but leave my Swiss army knife here instead of getting to the airport, failing security checks, and having to mail it home to myself and go through security again. So today I make lists and plans as I embark upon another work day with less sleep than normal.
Because I'm going to be out of town for ten whole days meaning I'll get little to no work done, I'm trying to get my book finished before I leave...in FIVE days! This may seem like unnecessary pressure, but you know when you're running a marathon and you only have a mile left...you're not going to stop for anything. Nothing. At all. No matter what. Because you're almost finished. And you really want to just be finished. I really want to just be finished with my book. And I'm so freaking close; I can literally taste it at this point!
Plus, I've written a rockin' query letter that I want to start sending out to literary agents to get this process moving along, so I can sell my book, you know, yesterday! So, I push myself to pack for a ten day trip, to not forget anything, and finish my book. All in the next five days.
So here we are. Yesterday, I put every event, major and minor, and time reference on a piece of posterboard. I had divided the posterboard up by months because in my head, I thought I knew when everything happened. Well, now I have all these events on my time line. (Yes, the dreaded time line I've been avoiding for a year is complete.) Putting all of these events on my time line made me realize two things: 1)I actually didn't have any idea when anything happened. I won't give away specific details of events, but there's one major event in the story that happened in the Fall in my imagination, but according to my book, it happened in early Spring. 2)The event that happens on the first freaking page of the whole damn novel is the one that's going to fuck up the ENTIRE time line of my story! Every other event can be moved or shifted pretty easily, but this one event was causing some MAJOR problems!
So last night, while my roommates and I were making dinner and playing Wii, I start discussing this one MAJOR problem and trying to come up with a solution. But not just any solution. At this stage in the game, the solution needs to be like one or two sentences and thus, really easy to fix! Well, after explaining my situation, my roommates gave me a couple of potential solutions, but they were BIG fixes! I can't use a big fix at this point. I can't go back and rewrite lots of various parts of the story for one scene. It's just not realistic. So we kept chatting. It took a minute, but we finally came up with a really easy, one or two sentence fix that makes the first scene completely plausible. Hallelujah!!! Like I said, the first scene was the only really big problem with my time line. The rest of the stuff is little and just needs to be nailed down.
This morning I got lucky and found a blank piece of posterboard. So, I'm going transfer every event from one posterboard to another, making them all fit together in a precise puzzle as I go. And then, I have to go back in and make changes in the novel of all of these event time changes. Hopefully this process will be completed today because I have several other things to work on in the next four.
For now, I leave you with a haiku composed in a state of insomnia.
The NFL draft
Is like the smell of rain. You
Lust for the real thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment