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.