Hi. Oh man, it’s me, your favorite chronic late-poster.
I’m keeping it pre-e-e-etty short this week.
Because I am . . .
. . . exhausted.
If you don’t know, I have a bad leg that’s been acting up for the past few days. That coupled with a much needed reset to the diet I’m on (now totally cutting sugar) has me absolutely wiped out.
And so does Memory.
I’m still writing it, of course, and my protagonists are on the cusp of entering the third act / endgame.
But man, some of the sessions this week were like pulling teeth.
In particular, there was one encounter Memory and Kole had with a bad guy. An encounter I thought would be a breeze to discovery write.
And I. Was. So wrong.
Full Disclosure: I spent at least three days on that one encounter.
Which wound up being about five pages long?
It was terrible. One of those instances where I wrote the encounter one way, then realized it wasn’t working, wrote it again, realized there was a whole other angle I could take it in and finally settled into an “okay for now” version that I know is gonna get heavy edits.
Just the worst.
I don’t know why I thought this wouldn’t be a problem for me, but the real tragedy here is that this encounter was the second out of three encounters I didn’t outline! The next one is the very end of the second act, which I’m going to get to by the weekend.
In my defense, I was convinced Future Louis would love writing these fight scenes. Unfortunately, it turned out Past Louis was an idiot.
On the plus side, another huge lesson learned: it’s not just okay to detail fight scenes in my outline, it’s kind of essential.
Setting descriptions? I can handle ’em on the MS.
Dialogue? I can discovery write it all day.
Fight scenes? No.
I am not the cartoon-loving cherub I once was, who collected video game boss music and wrote twenty-page-long fight scenes. That just isn’t me anymore (except for the collecting-boss-fight-music part) and I’m grateful.
But I also have to remember going forward that fights need to be plotted out every single time or I just get lost in the possibilities.
That said, please, wish me all of the luck for this weekend.
Because that last fight scene I didn’t outline has a pretty extreme power imbalance between characters, so I just know it’s going to be an absolute nightmare to write.
Godspeed, Future Louis!
~~~
That’s all for this week. If you want to find out how incredibly hung up I get on that last fight scene–or if you want to find out how long it takes me to finish this NaNoWriMo novel, Memory–you could always give my blog a Follow. And if you liked this post, I’d appreciate it if you gave me a Like because it’s the only means I have to gauge the content people like to read on here.
Until next time, take care, stay safe, and you should think about what you’re gonna Mandela Effect. I know it’s a long shot, but if you ever get godlike powers, you gotta Mandela Effect something. For me, it’s “bunana.” If I get god powers, the first thing I’m going to do is make it so half of the world thinks it was always spelled “bunana” while the other half remembers “banana” . . . So, long story short, don’t give me god powers. Things would get real annoying real fast.
Bye! Have a good weekend!
House of Error 
I get days like that all the time. Just grinding out words from the mill; sometimes coarse, crude flour that will eventually be refined into bread. Don’t be afraid to let those words lie, even if their sum effect seems underwhelming to you in the short term. You’re writing a novel and the feel of having a complete first draft in your hands will be immense. As Chuck Wendig said, ‘The mediocre novel you finish will always be better than the brilliant novel you didn’t.’
Yeah, I’m definitely falling back really hard on the memory of that feeling: the relief of finally being done with a first draft. And also the knowledge that regardless of how I feel about whatever I put down, edits are always, always going to make it better.