Monday, March 21, 2011

A new start, a new birth

Anybody who bet on the "he can't stay away for over 24 hours" horse, you win.

Writing is clearly addictive.  At least, writing creatively is addictive.  I never felt this way, to be sure, when writing case studies for my MBA classes.  "Oooh, that was really awesome.  While the rough draft settles on that one, let me go find another to begin!"  Nah, didn't happen.

It's different now.

I kinda understand, now, how Stephen King could spend the hours banging at a typewriter in his laundry room at night, and how Dan Brown could wake up at 4:30 every morning to write while he held down two teaching jobs.  Well...OK, not so much the latter.  The ONLY thing that gets me up at 4:30 is fishing.  But 5:00, perhaps?  Regardless, the point is...writing gets into your blood. 

So, I had lots of stuff I had talked about starting.  First, there were a couple of short stories I came up with a few weeks ago, based on my own blog post. Might be nice, after all, to get my first rejection letters out of the way quickly!  Second, I have a book already outlined in an entirely different genre.  But third, I still have Books 2 and 3 of the Rise of the Goddess series to write, and honestly, I'm on a roll right now.  I just finished the first book, and it was elating and grand and all the other greatly positive emotions I can describe.  Why not use that to propel myself into the next book? 

So...I did.  Got what I think is a totally awesome entry into it, in fact, keeping in mind that every 2nd-book-in-a-series I've ever read takes time to lay out the situation sorta logically.  Got a decent amount into it, in fact, and am leading up to the first spousal argument of the second book, and decided to call it a night. 

Which leads to the question...when do writers call it a night?  According to Stephen King, many do at a certain word count.  Some are extremely disciplined, reaching a specific word count by hook or by crook, and then and only then calling it done, even if it's in mid-sentence.  I just...can't.  For me, writing is like a woman.  Sometimes it needs caressing, pandering to, just to get a few hundred beautiful words, while sometimes it needs to be ridden hard and put away after a few thousand.  It's all dependent on the mood, frankly, in addition to the promise of the mood to come.  Where I end up is probably more related to what the next scene is than what the last one was.  That's so that the next time I sit down I'm eager to start again.  And, I must say, it works...I finished one novel already that way, and I'm already hungering to start back into what I've written so far. 

So...till later....g'night!

Word count: 1,080

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