Off and Running

Or at least walking very slowly, hampered by metaphorical limp.

Preliminary decision on the writing front is to work on finishing the draft of Sweet Home Emmaline. Looking at my list of options logically the winner should have been the Honeymoon Effect but that book has the same problem now it always had, one that I find insurmountable. It’s boring. I even completely redid the beginning, changed the characters names and their relationship to each other. It has all the elements it’s supposed to have but for some reason every time I sit down to write some words on it I have to grit my teeth and suffer through them. Perhaps my attitude to that book just isn’t right, and can’t be fixed no matter what I do. I expect to struggle with The Honeymoon Effect and so of course I do struggle with it—a self fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, I don’t feel drawn to write that book right now. Another time, perhaps. Sweet Home Emmaline is a better writing job, the characters are more interesting and their personality conflicts are palpable. I currently have 16,ooo+ words to work with, ‘work’ being the operative word there. I started writing this story last year and stopped when I came to a plot problem I couldn’t work out how to fix. Basically, I ran out of it. Plot, that is. My characters, showing their impatience (or perhaps mine), had sex way too soon and dispelled all the tension. So I’ve gone back and taken the sex scene out (there was closer to 20,ooo words in the ms initially—sigh), made it a hot kiss and continued with the initial conflict a little longer, even though one part of my brain tells me the heroine should be confessing the truth sooner rather than later, because why would she hide it??? Something to ponder another day, says Scarlett O’Hara. For now I’m off to see if I can add to the word count.

Wish me luck.

Sami