Daily Words: +1091

Early morning dispatch, since I was too tired to post last night when I finished, but yes–I made my words.

If I hadn’t had this blog (which no one is really watching yet, but still, it feels like an honest place) or a daily quota, I think I would have frozen where I was in the story. I like to try to park downhill at the end of the day, so beginning the process the next day will be easier. Well, I stopped in the middle of something, but it was in the middle of garbage. Total phoniness, and it was a downer to come back to that.

Let me see if I can explain a little more without talking too directly about the plot.

There’s this habit of all writers I think to get characters in a jam to ramp up the tension without having any idea how to get them out of it. Then, because you do, as a writer, have absolute control, you sort of … I dunno … fudge your way through it. Maybe you don’t directly introduce a deus ex machina (although I almost did before I slapped my own knuckles), but you do start piling on the little lucky breaks for your character.

All I can say is: bleck. It’s a hideous habit, but at least now I can eventually go back and rewrite some of it to layer in reasons why my character would be able to escape at such a time. I’ll think of something, and I’ll work backward, because it was ugly.

This is what I mean when I say the reality of a story is slipping. I mean I’m doing things that I feel at the time are cheating.

Also, it was fisticuffs time in my story. Yes, that’s right. I had cops, guns, henchmen (and holy hell did they suffer from Henchmen Syndrome, where they were the ones who were there to screw the whole thing up; the only thing henchman seem good at is taking the fall (for the hero winning the fight, that is) and allowing the bad guy to retain some semblance of competence), and fisticuffs in my horror novel! Poor fucking form indeed, but you have to trust me … This is how the story must be. For better or worse, this is the novel I’m writing, and if I didn’t have all this stuff, it would be even more fake.

But I fought through all that stuff and went on to write two very emotional scenes that I hadn’t even really been expecting to be so effective. After so much bland plot and action nonsense, there is was:

Real fucking story at the end of the day.

And I wouldn’t have gotten there without the push of a daily quota. Probably would have languished in the bad feelings of the bullshit plot for another month or two, because I’d broken the story and didn’t know how to pick up the thread of it again.

Glad I forced myself to face the page. Most important thing is to just keep writing. Bad day, good day … Keep writing.