Here be dust bunnies

Word­count = 83,959

If you’re in an office some­where today, look­ing out the win­dow and yearn­ing to be out in the autumn air, don’t be deceived. It’s damn freez­ing out here. The sky may be cloud­less, but small ones keep appear­ing in my study, whenever I breathe. On prin­ciple I refuse to put a jumper on, because it’s sunny and lovely and the sky is so big and enti­cing you just want to drop everything and go do extreme sports in it, but inside my stone house it’s as cold as an Immig­ra­tion Minister’s heart.

I’ve reached an inter­est­ing point at the end of my first week of full-time writ­ing. I’ve writ­ten much more than I thought, so much in fact that I’ve writ­ten myself out into unknown territory.

I men­tioned in an earlier post that if you know the way the story is going, you can have as many as four or five chapters in pro­gress at once. This has the tre­mend­ous bene­fit of allow­ing you to skip ahead if you can’t think of, for example, the right style of dia­logue for a man talk­ing to dust bun­nies, or the most evoc­at­ive descrip­tion of a per­son dressed as an eight foot tall slice of pizza, to get to the next bit of plot. You simply jump over the hard bit and keep going, safe in the know­ledge that you’ll be inspired later, when all you’ve left your­self is hard bits.

The res­ult is that I’ve traipsed mer­rily through my last act until I’ve got quite a long way into the big, intric­ate cli­max scene, without hav­ing given the slight­est thought to how it is going to work.

It’s a bit like being Red Rid­ing Hood deep in the dark forest. If you’re not care­ful where you step, there are wolves.

Which is to say, you can eas­ily miss an import­ant piece of inform­a­tion, for­get to tie up a bit of plot or, and I think this is what I’ve done, for­get an entire char­ac­ter. Unless this is quickly spot­ted and fixed, you can find you’ve writ­ten fifty pages of well-turned, elo­quent, com­pletely use­less prose. It’s a rookie trap, so I’m going back to the white­board to draw some maps, think it all through and make sure I haven’t missed anything.

I’m also going to turn on the heater.