Friday, January 8, 2010

What Can You See on the Horizon?

Evan is finishing reading what remains of the Eternal Spring manuscript, so I thought I'd put on the station that I listened to while writing to give him some fitting epic background music. Not sure he even notices it, but I like it.

Anyway, the first song that came on was the Annie Lennox song from the Return of the King soundtrack, "Into the West," and since this post is about getting back into finishing my book, I thought the words were fitting.

What can you see,
on the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea,
a pale moon rises.
The ships have come,
to carry you home.

A bit cheesy, I guess, when referring to oneself, but hey.

I read through the entirety of my Nano book the other day, finishing up the day before my cast was removed. Now I'm back in the spirit of things...but unfortunately, also screamingly aware of all the work I have cut out for me.

What I have is essentially 80 different directions all crammed into one manuscript. During November, I had a devil-may-care attitude, which was a must for actually getting through the month and 50k, but now I'm wondering how much that may have hurt me. Let's just say a continuity editor would probably have an apoplexy reading it as it is now.

The upside to reading it through was that I rediscovered some real gems that I'd promptly forgotten about once typing. My Nano friends can probably relate to this. There's such a rabid frenzy in getting the words out, that you could be spinning out the crux of the scene and have forgotten everything about it in the next paragraph. In my case, my characters are actually a whole lot cooler than I gave them credit for. They're also a lot more complex, complicated, and generally unhappy with the rap I've been giving them in my head all of December.

So, another pro is that I'm very excited to delve deeper into these layers I didn't realize I'd created. The con is that I'm going to have to start over from scratch, basically, in my world building and mythos-creation.

In later posts, I'll get into more detail about the story, but for now, just know that it's an urban fantasy-cum-science fiction tale about love, war, freedom, and adventure. Is that vague enough? Good.

My one-day uncasted wrist can't take much extended typing right now, so I'll have to end this here, but my mind is running at full tilt now...probably taking me straight to Crazy Town.

And I'm ready.

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