The Work is not possible without the System.
The System does not function without Workarounds.
The Workaround conflicts with the Work.

I considered walking from the Max stop to work; it’s just a dozen blocks, and snow was falling sort of slant-wise, and I like walking in snow. But…I’d have to cross the Hawthorne bridge, and the slant-wiseness of the snow told me that there would be wind, and my hat would very likely be blown off. “Mebbe,” I muttered to myself, “mebbe blown off into de treffik, mebbe into de river. Und eny plen vere hyu lose your het is a bed plen.” So I took the bus, instead.

I love the inside of my head. Jägermonsters live there.

In other news, I am so utterly pleased with how easy, organized, and modular my plotting has been that I just spent money buying Flying Logic Pro Version, at the very generous discount available to anyone, good until the 20th. You should buy a copy, too!

…I don’t know that I’ve ever been this enthusiastic over a commodity that wasn’t a book.

Last night I was zombie-tired. Shannon suggested that she pour me into bed and I could just go to sleep.

“Can’t. Need my fix.” Shannon smiled indulgently and let me write for an hour before pulling my plug.

Today I realized that I’ve been writing through lunch, every lunch, all week. I’ve been going to lunch earlier the past couple days, so I could get to it sooner. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll give me a long lunch (or a coffee shop morning before work).

Tonight Shannon called for bedtime. I looked speculatively at the computer I’d been fiddling with for two hours. “I think I can stop. I’m pretty sure.”

Not “I have to write.” Not “I should probably write.” Not “I still have a quota to do.”

*beatific smile*

Finally.

My first professional endorsement

I went to the Romance Writer’s Workshop, and became learned in the ways of storyboards. Fiddling with the storyboard let me know what was wrong with my novel. Good.Industriously making post-its and moving them around did not fix the problems, though. I concluded two things; the storyboard only permitted me access to the whole novel at night, at home, when I was pooped, and that I needed to murder a huge number of my darlings — but couldn’t tell which ones had to go. Shannon suggested last week that I tell her the story, which I did in brief, maybe a dozen sentences. “Which parts have to be there for the story you want?” First and last plot points. Which meant all the others had targets on their heads. Way to go, Shannon. That was a strangely liberating outlook. I changed from “something has to go” to “it will be interesting to see if anything stays.” I looked at the storyboard with loathing, and switched to tinytinytiny post-its and a notebook — portable storyboard. I was still not moving with anything approaching speed. It’s easy to move the story elements around this way, but still takes attention. Changing the writing on the notes takes time. And the sticky wears out. Then, Lisa, on whom be praise, suggested I look into Consistency. It won’t do much for me, I think, but that company also produces Flying Logic. My world shook. Yesterday I had a beginning and an end, and some very nice GMC notes. I put them into entities in Flying Logic and started making lines … which demonstrated when I had multiple scenes in the same scene; corrected that … which showed holes; corrected that … which revealed why my major plot points weren’t working; figured out what they had to be … which showed new scenes that had to be there … and where the tension had to build … and then discovered that I could customize the boxes in the program, changed them to match my post-it notes so I could see where I had too much of one element clustered …. I spent three hours of a train ride yesterday steadily creating a plot that works. I did not have a cat exploding kind of day. I had something better. I had a “knew my work and did it well” kind of day. It felt terrific. I could blow up cats for the rest of my life and not be professionally published, not make a living of it. But if I can, when I have no idea how to do what I’m doing, identify my work and do it well, then all I need to do is persist. Exploding cats are a perk of the job, not a requirement of the job.

Compared to the studied seduction of the novel, blogging is literary pole dancing. Anyone can stand naked in the window of the public’s eye, anyone can twitch and writhe and emote over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday. That is not fiction. That is life, and we all have one. Blogging condemns us to live everyone else’s tedious day as well as our own.

Would it be missing the point to write a deep analysis of this?