Saturday, January 3, 2009

Snack Time / Procrastination...

My reader is empty... for the first time in months! On one hand I'm pleased with myself for finally getting caught up. On the other, I now wonder what I'll use to kill time while I sit here munching on my croque monsieur on homemade pain de mie bread, which, by the way, is my new favourite food.

But Froggy... I hear you asking as you glance back up at the title of this post, You're unemployed... So what, exactly, could you be procrastinating??

Excellent question Campers, and the answer is thus: I have finally begun the dreadful process of editing my NaNo novel. I've made it through about the first 40 pages so far this afternoon, nitpicking a sentence here, altering a word choice there, but there are much larger concerns at hand that I am not feeling equipped to tackle, particularly considering the fact that I've been away from it for over a month now.

The first concern is the abounding plot holes. Like when I realized that I'd made at least three references to a storm brewing, both literally and figuratively, but that neither kind of storm ever actually occurred. Or that I keep alluding to the fact that there is apparently a war going on... yet we never actually see the ramifications of that.

You know, little stuff.

And then there's the final--and perhaps most daunting issue--which is that I'm so close to the damned thing that I honestly can't tell if it's any good or not. I know that I have a tendency to be hyper-critical of myself, but really, I Just. Can't. Tell.

Would anyone other than me ever want to read this thing?

Granted, there's enough dreck spread across the Fantasy shelves of bookstores around the country that I think, yes, there's probably somebody out there who would read it... but I'd still prefer not to write dreck, thankyouverymuch.

But then again, there are those few sentences that pop up every now and then that make me say "Oh! I like that one!"

---

“It is wise to know the difference.”
“Between?”
“A crime of necessity and a crime of desire. But do not fool yourself, it is still a crime.”

---

She fell back into the bed and pulled the blankets tight around her, a single tear sliding down her cheek, finding the weight of unsought kindness the most difficult to bear.

---

The wars that raged through that ancient time had left scars on both the land and the hearts of the people, many of which, even centuries later, still had not healed. She thought she could see those scars in the towering walls, in the angry torsion of ancient metal.

---


So perhaps it's not all dreck... but are three or four sentences enough to save a novel?

I'm guessing not.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

If only you knew a literary agent....

Princess of the Universe said...

I wonder if Anon IS a literary agent?
I think it's impossible for it to be dreck..those few sentences alone were fab!
xo

Anonymous said...

mmm...croque monsieurs....so good! i love the middle excerpt of your writing btw.

the frog princess said...

If Anon is who I *think* he is, then it's his girlfriend who is the agent... and a good friend of mine :)

Who knows? She just may get to see a copy of it soon...

Anonymous said...

Anon is not who you think he is, he's just some random guy who could really go for a croque monsieur about now.

B said...

That is soooo why I can never see myself writing a novel. I used to write fiction short stories... never again.

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