Heads Down

Not head down, as in hanging one’s head, but heads down, as in, nose to the grindstone. Except I only have one head, so the plural is irresponsible and misleading. And this answers the question of whether it’s possible to digress before you even get started.

So here’s the status. I’m pleased to say I’ve been writing an average of 6.5 out of 7 days since I got back into the saddle after the last road trip. Though that wording makes no sense, since the driver’s seat is more like a saddle than the seat at Starbucks I write in. But again I digress.

I wanted to write everything else before writing the climax of the story, so I went along finishing up the final chapters that lead up to it (that’s lead as in present tense, not the extremely annoying common modern misspelling of the past tense “led”). Then I found I had left a couple of other chapters unfinished, and one or two outlined but unwritten. Then I had to decide whether to write the denoument before or after writing the climax (do books have denouments or just movies?) All this took way longer than I had hoped, especially since I was slow to get into it at first.

But now things are moving along at a reasonable clip, though I continue to have the problem of writing too clean of a first draft, and am spending too much time on word selection and that sort of tweak that the second draft’s supposed to deal with. At this point I’ve got maybe a third of the first iteration of the climax written. I say it this way because I’m sure it will go through several iterations, i.e. rewrites by the time the book is completely done. That’s sort of disheartening, because it seems like everything I do now is throwaway, but I suppose you can’t start rewrites until you’ve finished the write.

Still hoping to finish the first draft before leaving on my next road trip, but it’s completely dependent now on whether I choose to leave next week or a month later to try to catch the turning of the leaves in Maine. Either way, I hereby swear on all that’s holy, that I will write at least 50% of days on my next road trip. (Although I’m agnostic at best, so I don’t know how much that’s worth.) Seriously, it ought to be more doable this time because I’ve learned enough about photography now that, and got my gear to the state where, that other activity shouldn’t interfere nearly as much with this one.