The Unification Chronicles

Another bang up week­end, a grand total of 196 words added to Cru­sade over two days. I did, how­ever, do a fan­tas­tic job of orga­niz­ing my Writ­ing Music playlist, all 108 hours of it. Nice that all the tunes are con­sis­tently named, for­mat­ted and all have album art, but it’s not writing.

Why am I blocked? The same gor­ram rea­son I’m always blocked. Because I’m ter­ri­fied. And why am I ter­ri­fied? Because I don’t know where I’m going.

I am a rare and very con­fused species, the Type A Bud­dhist. I want to go with the flow, let go of expec­ta­tions and all that, but I’d feel a lot bet­ter about it if I had an out­line and a set of require­ments to fol­low (yes, this is prob­a­bly a holdover from my days as a soft­ware devel­oper; I have a deep and pro­found fear of scope creep). I need to know not only where the story is going, but I need to have a rea­son­able idea of what I’m going to see on the way.

The prob­lem is that Rev­e­la­tion changed the story and the char­ac­ters so much from the orig­i­nal novella that very lit­tle of the orig­i­nal Cru­sade novella is still usable. Again, I know the basic beats of the story, where it has to end up and who has to die before we get there, but every­thing else is dif­fer­ent, and I find myself floun­der­ing try­ing to put one word after another in the dark.

My writer’s group says I’m just tired, hav­ing just fin­ished a novel in six weeks, and it’s okay for me to slow down for a while, gather my thoughts. They might have a point. In between writ­ing, I’m tran­si­tion­ing from one com­pany to another in my day job, said day job is migrat­ing users from one Exchange server to another, so I’m a lot busier at work than usual, my mom just had (suc­cess­ful) can­cer surgery and I’m des­per­ately try­ing to save up enough money to file bank­ruptcy (which seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but there it is). I’m under a lot of stress, and my body is start­ing to break down. I’m in near con­stant pain and have resorted to tak­ing mus­cle relax­ants just to get by. And I no longer have the NaNoW­riMo com­mu­nity to bol­ster my efforts and cheer me on.

All of that is a per­fectly accept­able excuse for why I’m not writ­ing Cru­sade at the same pace as Rev­e­la­tion. But it’s not a rea­son. It’s just an excuse.

Because the real rea­son I’m writ­ing so slowly is that I don’t know where I’m going. Again. My out­line for Act 1 of Cru­sade is a dis­or­ga­nized mess of vague story ideas. No won­der my nar­ra­tive prose sounds like aim­less wan­der­ing. That’s what it is.

So today, in between all the other stuff I have to do, I’m going to really tighten up the out­line for Cru­sade Act 1. I’m not going past the act break, because I want to remain flex­i­ble. But every­thing up to that act break needs to be thought out, delin­eated. Because only when I know where I’m going can I really open up the throt­tle to get there.