Who says you can’t judge an author by their cover?
So I’m making what I again hope is a last pass through Lord of the Freeborn (key word, there, being “again”). What I’m seeing makes me optimistic. The first thirty pages ran by in a breeze, and we’re just now getting to the part where I expect most of the surgery will need to be performed. (Here, and the last 5-10 pages of the story, really). It’s all setting up so very nicely.
As I’ve gone through these last two months of preparing to leave the day job, several people at work have asked me what a writer does. Sometimes by this question they mean “do you get contracts?” They are questions abut whether I can make any money at this folly of mine. This form of the question, perhaps not so oddly, generally comes from more senior leaders. But most of the time the question is pointed directly at what a writer does on a daily basis. They want to know how I work, or how one goes about deciding what to do next. “I’ve never known anyone who left the company to be a writer,” one woman said. The idea of this kind of a job is hard for them to get their heads around.
And that’s completely okay. It’s actually very hard for me to explain, which means it’s very hard for me to get my own head around, so why wouldn’t it be hard for a bunch of folks who haven’t written for 25 or so years to do it?
The process that is happening with Episode 7 – Lord of the Freeborn is a perfect case in point. I cannot explain why it’s taken so long. Most of the other segments of the story have been pretty straight forward, and when I’m finished with episode seven, I don’t think it will read any differently than the first six. I hope that it’s all essentially seamless story, of course. But LotF has been a problem child since the beginning.
I don’t know why.
Please don’t ask.
It just has been. I sit down and work on it pretty much every day. I try this, I analyze, I try that. And eventually it gets to where I want it. That’s what I do. Quite honestly, almost everything I write these days happens at a considerably faster rate, but LotF has been persnickety.
But life, she goes on. And in the end, I suppose there will be a time when I’ll love Episode 7 just as much as any other, specifically because it’s made me work for it.
That time may, however, be in the distant future. [grin]