So the leaf-raking event of Sunday did me in, and by this morning I was feeling way too crappy to rear my ugly head at work. I ended up spending the day taking Airborne, Advil, Benadryl, and sleeping like crazy.
Waking up late in the afternoon, I headed out to my daughter's ballet class, since this was the one week we were allowed to observe. And before anyone is thinking that I'm some sort of kick-ass father for "going the extra mile," showing up for the class when I was sick, you should know that I actually dozed off during the class. I don't think Piper saw me, as I was tucked into a corner of the room, on the floor. (Please don't tell her.)
I'd like to think that all that sleep bought me beaucoup creative minutes with my muse tonight, but it didn't feel that way. I powered through a section tonight and got a lot of words down on paper, but I feel sometimes like I'm redefining the unofficial motto of NaNoWriMo: "Quantity before quality."
I finally, painfully, introduced the two major characters that are going to upend Walt's pretty-messed-up-already life. (In fact, what they're truly doing is righting his ship.) They come in the form of Sherry, a single mom, and Arden, her five-year-old daughter.
I've been resisting introducing Arden for the longest time. She scares me because I want her to be so . . . right. Naturally, she's going to be heavily based on my two daughters, and that's probably why I want her to be so true. I have thoroughly convinced myself that I'm going to completely botch Arden's character development. So, like so many aspects of this novel, I am praying that the editing process is going to allow me the time and ability to give the characters, the settings, the descriptions the kind of depth they deserve. (Translation: Marck is going to give everything the typically over-wordy treatment he gives everything he writes.) (This blog entry a case in point, n'est-ce pas?)
I came across these eight rules for non-fiction that Kurt Vonnegut wrote sometime back. (It would have been hard for him to do it, say, yesterday, wouldn't it?) And one of those eight rules sticks in my head as I think about editing this quickly growing behemoth: "Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action."
Gulp.
Just the thought of editing with this foremost in my mind makes me feel like this might be the most painstaking process ever.
I'm getting close to the end of the outline I had created before I started. And I'm nowhere near the end. So I've started to try to finish up an outline of the chapters/scenes remaining. I created the next three chapter outlines, and then just because it's the only other thing I knew, I created chapter 100 and wrote about the final chapter. Now I'm adding chapter 99, chapter 98, etc. I'm hoping the two trains will meet in the middle somewhere . . . and that I'll then get to go back and renumber those chapters! Because if this thing is really looking at being 100 chapters, I have a friggin' out-of-control nightmare on my hands.
Speaking of nightmares: I had a doozy last night, the kind that you wake from whimpering and looking to hold your wife tight in bed. (Laura has no recollection of this happening.) The dream stayed clear in my head when I woke up in the morning — an extremely rare occurrence. I can't find it's connection with my life. I'm wondering if this is the novel talking . . . or if this is simply the delusional nightmares of a drugged up pseudo-novelist.
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