I’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week or ten days, mostly because I’m trying to wrestle my current work in progress into submission. I haven’t been doing much email, or tweeting, and I sure haven’t been learning Facebook. I did take the time out to watch a couple of movies with my hubby. Unfortunately, one of them was Transformers 2. Two & a half hours of boredom. When Bumblebee (i.e. the Autobot who DOESN’T SPEAK) is the most engaging character, you know there are problems. But I digress.
Wrangling the WIP. This particular one is more complicated than I anticipated. One of the characters is a painter. Some of the pertinent back story occurs during the Great Depression. “No problem,” I say. A quick Internet crawl & I’ll have all the stuff I need to know for that (I’ve already bitched… er… blogged about the whole penis factor for this story & my title woes). “It’s just going to be a novella, I should be able to pop that out pretty quick.” I say. I was soooo wrong. I still love the idea, but I’m starting to kick myself for making my life difficult.
It’s kind of a long distance romance, and the two guys don’t meet face to face until near the end. Trying to have two people fall in love without meeting… I imagine it’s easier to do in real life than it is to write about it. GAH! And, there’s another little twist… which I’m not going to mention here… that is more or less tripling the complication of their developing relationship.
This is also the first time I’ve written scenes out of order. I usually like to write from beginning to end, but because this story has a few flashbacks (and I wasn’t sure where I wanted them), I wrote a bunch of scenes out of order. Which, honestly, has just confused me. So tonight, I got out the whiteboard, and started mapping scenes. Usually that’s a little too confining for me, but since I managed to complicate things for myself, I needed the help sorting things out. Hubby though, came up in the middle of my very serious timeline mapping, and laughed at the fact I’d plotted in “masturbation”. Well, the two guys aren’t together for much of the book — it’s bound to happen AND it’s important to the story.
Despite the laughter, I think I’ve got it figured out — YAY — but it’s going to be rather longer than I expected. Still, I’m hoping for a first draft by the end of the month — which means I’m probably going back under my rock.
I’m happy to read that the whiteboard helped!! Your novella sounds intriguing 😀 I really enjoy long-distance relationships, especially m/m ones!! I’ll be excited to know how this comes out 🙂 I can’t wait!!!
Tame (chrysalis1975)
I’ve plotted in ‘masturbation’ and ‘oral’ scenes before and that’s exactly why I hide my outlines from my husband. I’d never hear the end of it 😉
Thanks Tame – I’m really hoping I can bring together all this unexpected complexity!
Katie – yeah, I’ve also added ‘sex’ to the timeline, but it’s not as entertaining on the whiteboard as ‘masturbation’ or ‘oral’!
The one time I tried writing my scenes out of order I managed to get myself in a real mess. (Incidently it was on my latest release). I’ve never done it again!
I have to agree about Transformers 2. The first movie was great but the second was a big yawn.
Shelley, I think this will be my last attempt to write out of order! Maybe if I was more of a plotter, it wouldn’t be so hard. 🙂