Finding my Commitment Lacking

What happened to Tawni Barclay? The Oncoming Storm

Finding my Commitment Lacking

So I’m trying not to fall out of a good habit by continuing to use my afternoons for editing. I have started on the second White Dragon Black novel, ‘Bindings & Spines’ now that ‘Tomorrow Wendell’ is done. The first chapter needed some work, but nothing I wouldn’t expect coming back form my personal editor.

The second chapter, however…. well, you know the saying ‘Kill your darlings’- it wasn’t even very darling. Actually most of the darlings got to stay. The rest – the majority – is gone, replaced with something more engaging and exciting.

Once I’d concurred that issue, I read chapter three. Not only was it also lacking in pazzz, it now didn’t match up with chapter two… which meant some major rewrites.

Then to top it off, my editor had made a good point about a sub-subplot I thought was going somewhere which really didn’t during the actual novel writing, but then I went back to it at the end chapter because I was thinking about making it something that arced over the entire series. Did that confuse you – well that’s why it is going away too … though I confess it went into a separate file to be saved (as though I’m actually going to do something with it later – scoff).

Because of all this frustration, confusion, and slow down, my enthusiasm for doing the ‘edits’ is waning. I was hoping to be getting a chapter edited a day – maybe every two days- really buckle down and set my shoulder to the stone. Instead, a weeks has passed and I’m still labouring through chapter three, while dreading what horror the fourth contains.

I am trying but I must confess the commitment is lacking — maybe being away from home for too long now isn’t helping. Maybe, just maybe, once I settle in to being back home at the end of the week, this major overhaul won’t seem so depressing.

Or maybe I’m just going to have to accept that this project while take more time and more me to complete.