"Love on the rocks with a twist of desperation,"- Eve 6, There's a Face
I suppose I should come clean. I'm in New Zealand, embarking upon a 6 month adventure of migrant labour and summer-during-winter before returning to Colorado in the spring to hopefully begin my career in publishing in earnest. It's the sort of adventure a lot of people dream about but never actually live. A co-worker of mine who is also a writer got all excited when I told him about the trip and started talking about Kerouac's On the Road. I've never read On the Road. It's on 'the list' to be sure, but I haven't gotten around to it.
To be honest, this adventure isn't about my writing, it's about me. And therefore it's also somewhat about my writing, as everything that effects me inevitably effects my writing. Case-in-point: with all this unemployed free time I'm enjoying at the moment, I've had plenty of time to write. I just haven't been able to (more on this in a later post...MARTIIIINNN!!!).
And that's all right, I think. I've come a very strange period in my writing process where I don't feel the need to press through too quickly. I'm moving slowly through the revision of Soulwoven, but moving with deliberation and doing it right. I recently spent two weeks writing two chapters only to realize that, in the end, they need to be cut. They're great character development, but the plot does not move in them. At all...not a single sentence, not a single word related to the broader, overarching drive behind the story. They're just characters talking in a coffee shop, although instead of a coffee shop it's the prow of a beaten and battered clipper sailing through the icy north seas of their world. And in the end, characters just talking isn't what Soulwoven is about. So I'll keep the chapters I've written on-hand, maybe to include in a 'director's cut' of the novel someday, or offer for free on my website for those who are interested, but in the end they have to go.
Strange, to spend so long writing something only to cut it, but there was a feeling of "Ahhh, THAT'S what I need to do," that came over me when I made the decision to axe those chapters. And more and more I've come to associate that feeling with the best of my writing. Wonder if it's the same for the rest of you.
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