New Year, New Process. Gak!

I should have been in here bright and early first thing this morning, with a brilliant post welcoming everyone back from their holidays. Preferably something magnificently motivating. However, my deadline is breathing its hot, heavy, drooling breath down my neck and that takes precedence.

I do have some goals and aspirations for 2010, and as soon as I get a few moments I'll sit down and articulate them. One thing on that list is to do less and enjoy it more. I must confess to feeling a tad scrambled and fragmented last year. As I climb into my writing cave for the next two months, I will be cutting back on some online commitments until I finish this puppy. I'll still blog, but probably only once or twice a week. (Although, having said that, whenever I announce I need to pull back on blogging, I seem to get bitten by the blogging bug, so we'll see...)

This current book has had more fits and starts, epiphanies and dead ends, than any three of my other books combined. Plus, the deadline got moved up on me. But every time I panic and try to power through it or force it, all the fairy dust evaporates and the delicate tight rope of story I am walking disintegrates out from under my feet. I am therefore stepping waaaay out of my comfort zone with my writing process on this novel. Usually I am the Queen of Multiple Drafts, but not for this book. I no longer have the time for that, for one thing.

So I am trying out an entirely new process for the balance of this book. Although, this process has not been chosen at random. No, I think the book has been leaning toward it all along, but it is so foreign to me that I have either feared it or fought it, most likely both. But frankly, I don't have time to fight any more, so I'm embracing this new process and praying my muse knows what she's doing.

I will be writing only three pages a day, polishing as I go, and doing mad research and world building in the afternoon. This will give me a finished manuscript on precisely the day it is due, no time for major revisions. However, I am hoping that, to a certain extent, past is prologue and the first three books have acted as a discovery draft of this one, since the action in it has been determined by what happened in the earlier books. I'm also hoping that all those fits and starts are the equivalent of aborted drafts, ones I was able to jettison as soon as I grasped what I needed to do differently.

Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.