Various Writing Struggles

The novel is still moving…much in the way that continents do. By the time California runs into China, I might actually finish it…

I got bogged down in chapter nine, 130+ pages in, when I realized that there were organizational drawbacks to having three different  protagonists proceeding on three different narrative tracks, connected but independent, sometimes intersecting, and not always knowing who the characters from the other tracks were. And oh yeah, flashbacks! So I’ve been finding that the need to constantly back up and refer to previous sections to double-check people’s hair colors and car makes and uncle’s names is proving less than conducive to actually writing, which is where the bloody fun is.

In an attempt to rectify this, I downloaded the trial version of Scrivener and so far it seems like it might be a decent solution to the organization problem. On the other hand, I feel like now I’ve set myself up for more work: writing the chapter synopses, creating character descriptions, color-coding the PoVs, creating more references and charts and diagrams…it feels like it will take a while to figure out and populate the program enough to actually use it. (That’s how it feels…I’m not saying it isn’t an excuse to procrastinate!)

Any Scrivener experts out there with brilliant advice that will instantly launch me into prolonged bouts of creativity?

Meanwhile, this week I got not one but two short story ideas. In light of how slow and endless the novel has felt lately, I thought it might be a nice change of piece to “crank out” something finishable. Heh, you know where this is going…so I sat down to work on one or the other of them, stared at the computer for ten minutes, and pfffffft. There I go again, thinking destination instead of journey…a recipe for instant block. Man, short fiction is tough.

On the plus side, I’m still enjoying writing the blog. It’s keeping my fingers moving on the keyboard, and pushing my “getting published” buttons much in the same way writing for Tangent did several years ago. And, thankfully, I still don’t seem to give a shit whether or not anybody’s reading it, which is pretty much the only way I can keep writing anything!