(no subject)

[desperance]

This book is just at that stage where the burden of it is shifting almost day to day. It's only a couple of days since I understood for sure that it would overrun my putative target of 450 pages, which is the moment where the sentence loses its period, as it were; it shifts from a fixed term to an indeterminate. They always do do this, but it's always a more radical change than you expect. I've lived with this book for a year, knowing that it would be 450 pages/150,000 words long; as of now, I have no idea how long it will be.

Yesterday, as an amplification of that, I hit that state where it actually feels as though the ending is running away from me, that no matter how much I write, I'm still falling behind. When you write books the way I do, with as little planning as possible, the ending is always a very open and empty space when you actually get there. I do more or less know what the last line will be - and that's not particular to this book, I always do - but everything else just has to sort itself out. The argument goes that if I can get all these characters into that space, in that condition, then all the necessary reactions will occur and an ending will arise. I do kind of depend on this happening, and it's never let me down yet; but at the same time I do get anxious every time, because I feel sure that one time or another it will let me down, there won't be an ending and the book will just unravel...

Lots of stuff going on, mind. Violence and such, both sides of the river (cries of 'about time, too!' - quiet in the cheap seats, there!). I start every day really not knowing where I'll be at the end of it, or what I will have done. And to whom. (He's still got that knife in his belly, and I am so glad about it; a Mean Thing, undoubtedly, but remarkably necessary. I cannot now understand why I didn't see it coming.) Which means, of course, that I start every day wondering if this is the day when I will finally get stuck. Until, ooh, ten seconds ago, I thought that perhaps I was stuck today; I've written a page, but had no idea where it was leading. Now I know. It's something I set in place early in the first book, without really thinking about it, finally achieves its pay-off late, late in the second. Hurrah.

In other news: I am a creature of habit, and I have broken a lifelong aversion. Extraordinary. I suppose, alternatively, one could say that I have inaugurated a new habit (tho' I don't expect it to last). You could call it toast and honey. Or, alternatively, breakfast.

I am not a breakfast person, any more than I am an early-morning person; I have spent the bulk of my forty-seven years clinging to my bed and flinching away from food any time before noon at the very earliest. But these days - see 'new habits', described above - I am getting up ridiculously early and at my desk at 7am, with the cat fed but myself not even coffee'd. I work for an hour, and then break (all right, to watch Star Trek TNG on Sky, I confess it) - and by then, it's not that I'm actually hungry, I just feel that I deserve a treat. This is the way I've always worked, by bribe. It used to be cigarettes that kept me at my keyboard; these days, it's chocolate-coated coffee beans in the morning and wine & nibbles after that. 7am is too early for anything, but after an hour I make a pot of coffee and, yup, toast & honey. It's a fine combination, you should try it sometime. Lashings of butter between the two. I shall grow fat, no doubt...

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It's called River of the World. Bridge of Dreams, River of the World, are you seeing my meaning here...?

Now listed on Amazon, so it must be true...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I wish they wouldn't do that. It makes me feel threatened. And there's always the high possibility that the editor will hate it first time out and make me rework it, so the date is just a fancy anyway. This egg hasn't even reached the open air yet, let alone the incubator. I am egg-bound. One way or another.