Plucking Away.

I know, I know, my blog has been quiet for the last few days. It should come as no surprise to my loyal blog minions that this is because I've been grinding away at Cover Me. I'm bound and determined to finish this one soon, before I get into that frame of mind where I'm so damned sick of the story, I'll just throw some words down to get it finished. That, and once it's done, the characters might leave me alone and let me sleep for once. So, I've been off Blogger, Facebook, AbsoluteWrite, everything. Even MSN, unless Scarlett is on.

I'm still pretty optimistic about this book. The characters keep throwing me curves, but that's a good thing. This outline seems to be more flexible than Gumby, because I've been moving chapters around, adding scenes, and deleting scenes on almost a daily basis. Hopefully I'm not fucking it up by doing that, but it seems to be working.

Even my minor characters are joining in on the characterocracy, too. I have one minor character who croaks in chapter 1, and she decided - after I'd written over 50,000 words - that she wanted to die of a different injury. She still bit it in the same chapter, but when her autopsy results come out later, a few things change significantly. This required rewriting bits and pieces of a few subsequent, but already written, chapters, because the nature of her death impacts the main character emotionally. And that's all I'm going to give away

Today, the plan is to finish at least three of those scenes(tm). They're all started (all the chapters in the book are at least started), I just need to finish them off. So to speak.

You read that right: Every chapter is at least started. I have 30 chapters total, 14 of which are finished and 16 of which are started. Those that are started have anywhere from 150 to 3,500 words. I flit from chapter to chapter, writing a few hundred or a few thousand words before another chapter demands my attention. If you think that's madness, you should see how scattered the individual chapters are: I might write the last few paragraphs, then scroll up and write a few from the middle. Then I'll wedge a few in between, jump to the beginning, go back and add to the end. I'll even write individual paragraphs that way...sometimes the last sentence I write is the first sentence of the paragraph. I'm not exactly sure when I started doing this, but it works, so I'm not going to argue with it. Call it ADD, call it what you will. It works.

And yes, I sometimes write my blog entries this way too, though not quite to the same extreme. Just goes to show there is no wrong way to go about writing a book as long as you actually write it.

Now, back to causing mischief, mayhem, and manlove in the world of Cover Me...