I was BACK today, y’all. 100%. Praise be to baby g.
I sat down to write today, and by the time I looked up and took a breath, 90 minutes had gone by. Then I took a break, and sat down for another 30 or so and finished the scene I was working on. I even started work on the next scene, so I could hit the ground running tomorrow.
And even more importantly…MUCH more importantly…I am IN on this book. I am inside it. For the first time since I really first thought up the rough concept. I don’t really know how else to explain it, but I was in the flow today, I was there as things were happening, and it was magic. It was good. It was a really, really tough scene in the sense that it’s one of those scenes where a character’s arc is established for the whole book, and it has to be done in such a way that’s also dramatically interesting in its own right…I found it today. Thank you baby g!
I also got all my narrations done, I finished the TG1T episode that I’d left in the middle of last night…though I didn’t start the next one, that was one thing I fell a bit short on…I got all the miscellaneous admin stuff done today that I needed to, including sending off an email to my VIP readers (in your inboxes tomorrow AM), and shit…I even sat down and watched the first episode of Dark while I ate breakfast. It was so, sooooo good at putting me in the mood to write. So, that’s a tradition now: Ira watches stories while he eats breakfast, not comedy. It helps with the process.
Oh…and I wanted to share some “process” stuff, too, tonight. Something that helps me get a scene where it needs to be: whenever I find myself wanting a scene to about something specific, but it’s just not seeming to work, I skip over into a different program–today it was pages, sometimes its notes–and I just write the dialogue out, starting with the lines I want to fit in and then I riff with lines on either side of that aim…and it breaks the scene open.
The real takeaway here, at least in my mind, is doing this in a program separate from my actual manuscript. I don’t know why, and it sounds stupid…but that separate document somehow lowers the anxiety for me, and allows me to just muck around until I have something that flows the way I want, and hits the things I want it to. It’s freedom.
At the end of the day, I got to watch the Warriors absolutely embarrass themselves against the Jazz. They lost by 30 points. To the Jaaaazzzz. Ugh. It was ugly. But, we turn the page. Not sure who they play next, but they better.
That’s all for tonight 🙂 It’s good to be back, guys. Looking forward to tomorrow.
Artwork this evening is from Virgil Finlay, and it makes me want to sing “I sing the body electric” which makes me miss Lana Del Rey, back when she was a badass. Sigh…