Storytellersunplugged

I’m a little overwhelmed, as usual, with things clutching and dragging at me, but I wanted to take a little bit of time to talk about how schedules and best-laid plans can go to Hell in a handbasket, as my step-dad was fond of saying. I’ve spent a very chaotic few years bouncing form personal disaster to personal disaster, writing in mad sporadic bursts and not writing in molasses-thick periods of lethargy. I have written novels that are better than they should be, and others that are worse. I’ve bounced from project to project like a ping pong ball. It’s no way to make ice cream.

In any case, I find myself in one of those weird transition periods in my career, and standing at a crossroads. It will be November 1st tomorrow, and National Novel Writing month will commence. Normally I’d flip into high gear, drop everything else, and write a new book. I’m not doing that this year. Instead, I’m expanding the new habit of outlining that Nanowrimo has given me into a larger, more over-reaching outline of the next year.

I have a novel, “The Orffyreus Wheel,” that shows great promise. Most of it has been published on Amazon.Com as a series of digital shorts, but I never wrote the final installment. The college blues, the new job, and a host of other things contributed to this glitch in my productivity, but I won’t try to blame those things. I just didn’t “Git ‘er done,” and so the novel remains unfinished.

Last year during Nanowrimo I wrote over 60,000 words of a novel titled “Gideon’s Curse,” but the intended market decided to go a different direction, and as much as I love that book - it fell under the tread of Algebra and Biology along with the other novel, and it — too — remains unfinished.

So, here is my plan. I’m going to carefully revise both novels in November, instead of writing something new, and when I reach the point where I quit writing, I’m going to finish them. I’m going to patch the holes I previously ignored, flesh out the characters, and make sure these two books are worthy of prime-time appearances - then hand them to my agent and regroup. I have the bare beginnings of a new idea that I will work on (slowly) when this is all done - trying to be more complete and careful, at least until my “groove” returns.

I feel like I need to get this old work off my plate before I can really figure out where to head next, and I also feel like I need to come at this strategy with my mind “in the game” and the output clean and as good as I can get it.

The point of all of this is that it is very easy to get caught up in too many things at once and rush int and through them, and that when you do that quality is at least questionable, if not sacrificed on some level. My writing during this past year has slowed to a near halt, and in that period of inactivity I’ve had a good chance to look over the body of words that came before and take stock of the next level of the cliff. I have pitons in hand and my climbing ropes have been checked for fraying and cuts. I’m off to the summit in 2008.

Anyone with the urge to join me can (as every November) sign up to read along with my November work by sending an e-mail to: Orffyreus-subscribe@yahoogroups.com - I’ll be posting the novel as I revise it. Normally you’d have to pay .49 a section for the first book, but this will be the revised version, and If you sign up…you read for free. You’ll get two novels before November is done, or close to it, and I won’t be stopping until both are complete, in any case.

Welcome to November in the Year of Dave - 48.

Onward!

DNW