November
So this year has been busy for all the wrong reasons. I haven’t made a blog post since January because I haven’t had anything to blog about. I’ve been working a hell of a lot, siphoning every spare penny that I earn into funding my Masters Degree which has been sucking up the vast majority of my ‘spare’ time. All in all I haven’t written a single thing.
Am I being pretentious and/or making excuses when I say that I haven’t been inspired to write anything? Maybe, but at the same time I haven’t been excited about creating anything in forever, and it’s impossible (for me anyway) to just sit down and churn out decent stuff if I’m not in the ‘zone’ so to speak. This Authority of Stars prequel that I talked about at the beginning of the year has died a death as of right now. Will I revisit the idea? Definitely, it’s a decent little story with a lot of potential, but in the meantime I need to reconnect with my universe in a way that’s conducive with my current lifestyle; by editing a novel that I wrote nearly two years ago.
Why have I put it off for so long? Well… editing sucks. It’s boring and repetitive, and after all those hundreds of hours all you have is a slightly different version of what you started with. Editing takes all of your finely crafted characters and worlds, every romance, every dramatic battle, and boils them down in phrases and clauses and grammatical errors that you have to pore over, over and over and over again… but it’s worth it, because I want my stories to be perfect and I won’t pay/trust anyone else to do it for me. Another reason why it’s taken me so long is because I simply forgot about it. On the one hand The Theseus Paradox was a labour of love that took me an entire year, through most of which I was unemployed, but on the other hand it’s just another Word document; put on the shelf and easy enough to forget about.
What really inspired me to take action here and now is the reappearance of November’s ugly beast NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge where people attempt to write 50,000 words of prose within the month of November. The point is to get something on the page that you can then edit afterwards and generally mould into something decent/legible. It’s a fairly simple premise, and in my opinion a fatally flawed one. The average Joe seems to think that getting the story on the page is the hardest part, and of course they would because they’ve never been in a position where they’ve had to edit anything. In my humble opinion splurging any old crap on the page just to hit a target word count is an incredibly backward way of writing, and its something that I’d never do because writing is a craft, not a race. You don’t see artists farting paint all over the canvass for 10 minutes and then rearranging it for the next 12 months, because during those 12 months, the excitement has long since ended and their early keenness to finish has only made the inevitably tedious follow-up job all the more soul destroying.
tl;dr, fuck nano because editing >>> I should do some editing! >>> started editing
Hopefully I’ll be finished early next year sometime but who knows? Editing is a cruel mistress.