What’s wrong
It’s been a couple of days since I came back from the vacation, and today I hoped to go back to writing.
Unfortunately, jet-lag decided to hit me with all its force, so I spent too much time sleeping or feeling way too sleepy.
On the bright side
I’ve been doing something all the way through the vacation: some editing, translating, and even a bit of writing. I didn’t finish outlining the Dragons, but that’s because I have a spot there that seems to be tricky: I need the final escalation trigger, and I haven’t yet come up with one.
Also, a new character suddenly decided to pop up. Not completely out of the blue at this point, since I mentioned him in the last edit of the first chapter, but he wasn’t supposed to be important at all. Yet he squeezed himself between main characters, claimed to have his own relationship with each of them, and now is waiting for me to write him in. Blast.
He does seem to add to the story and in a good way. Maybe even in a necessary way. But I already have almost half a million words (for 4 books) and yet at least one more important character is hardly introduced. What have I been writing then? Gosh, I don’t know. A mystery.
The books don’t even feel that long. The second one has barely any important plot points, except the ending. Did I write too many notes? Maybe. That’s what I’m planning to do: to structure and transfer only the needed portion into a new file in Scrivener. I hope it will cut off the clutter. On the other hand, it might happen I’ll find that I wrote too many notes and hardly have anything in the novel at all. Blast again.
Back to writing
Anyway, for now, I’m still in an outlining mood. I want to know what on earth happened that ruined everything. Simply curious. I will probably write some rough drafts so that I don’t forget what is happening at a certain point, but the main focus is on the outline. No mandatory word count either, at least till I have the outline finished.
Other stuff
I keep translating and editing. Surprisingly, The Charmed Prince stopped to frighten me since I converted it into a Word file. For some reason, editing in Word seems easier and more natural than in Scrivener.
On the other hand, I bogged down in translating Voyage Dream Inc. Ghm, I even think of abandoning it, though quitting now, after so much time spent on it, feels very bad. Still, I think I’m much better starting to translate Unknown instead, because it wasn’t translated, so I can rewrite it in English instead of trying to correct a crappy translation. The damn Voyage slows me down, and I can’t bring myself to go back to writing new short stories because of it. Maybe I should learn to quit intentionally, after all, instead of abandoning. “The benefit of failure is that you can learn from it,” don’t remember who, but certainly a wiser man than me.
