So, the big question on my mind right now is, “Where is my Veronica Mars movie download already?” Eeee! I am so excited to watch it, and I’m scouring my email like a hawk. Yes, it is only 10:00 AM here, but… I want it. I want it now. (I backed the movie on Kickstarter, so this is one of my “benefits” or whatever.)
Anyway, to get my mind off the waiting, here’s my weekly round up.
I’m still working on Moon Dance, the third Cole and Dana book, and it’s kind of going strangely. I’m really into this book, like I really want to be writing it, but it’s not exactly flowing easily. I think the best flow day was probably Sunday, in which I banged out my 8K in back-to-back sessions between the hours of 12 noon and five o’clock. Monday was a close second.
On Tuesday, I stopped being able to get 2K in an hour. All of my sessions that day are 75 minutes or 80 minutes. The trend continued Wednesday. On Thursday, I just threw out my timer and took short breaks at the end of each scene, regardless of how long they were. I started at 11 AM and didn’t get done until 5:25.
The book is at 50K currently, which means it’s right on schedule. I should be able to write the remaining 40K next week and finish the first draft by next Thursday. That’s the plan, anyway.
Weird things are happening in this book. Weird, disturbing things that freak me out, because I’m totally terrified of scaring of all of you guys off. There’s a scene in the book–you’ll know it when you get there, trust me–and I don’t think I’ve read anything like it… ever. It was on the outline, because I somehow mistakenly thought it was going to be hot. But then I got there, and I wrote for twenty minutes trying to get around it somehow. I just didn’t want to do it. I realized it wasn’t going to be hot at all, it was just going to be fucking disturbing.
Eventually, I had to do it. I realized it needed to be there. So, I wrote the scene.
And then I thought that I was in trouble, because the aftermath of it was going to scar Dana beyond all belief. But I forgot that Dana is incredibly screwed-up in the head. So, she kind of popped up and went, “Valerie, this is the way I would react to that.”
And I said, “Dana, are you kidding me? I would never react that way.”
She just kind of shrugged.
So, now I’m freaked out. When you guys read this book in a few weeks, we’ll see if it freaks you out as much as it freaks me out. Actually, this whole book is just going into really weird territory. In a lot of ways, I feel like the Cole and Dana series is a chance to revisit themes that I explored in the Jason and Azazel series and to get them “right” this time. J&A just got so huge and unwieldy and I really didn’t know where I was going with it. I felt like I foreshadowed things and then never followed through on them, and I felt like everything got so weird and confusing that I couldn’t tie it all up.
With Cole and Dana, I’m really trying to do this “right,” and I think I’m feeling a lot of pressure about doing that, because I’m afraid I’ll screw it up. I’ve also got this idea that “right” is going to make everyone mad, and they’re going to hate the ending of the series. (Oh, don’t worry. They don’t die or anything like that.) So I guess I’m struggling between trying to live up to my imagined idea of “good art” and my imagined idea of audience expectation. Problem is, both of those things are really unknowable, so I can’t truly please either of them.
“Want some help, please myself,” to quote “Polly,” by Nirvana.
Which happens to be on the Spotify playlist for Cole and Dana, which I listen to daily while drafting.
What’s that? You want this playlist? Well, okay, then. (It’s meant to be listened to on shuffle as some of the same artists butt into each other. And if you’re on goodreads or something, I have no idea if it will embed there. So click on over to website if you want to have a listen.)
