Sunday, January 29, 2012

Losing Werewolf Bits

I'm continuing to get better. So much so that I'm feeling guilty about not hitting the gym quite yet. My day will come.

Something really crappy happened on Wednesday (which is probably why I forgot my semi-weekly post!). I wrote a relatively long bit of material on werewolf genetics. I went through about 5 or 6 pages, deciding recessives, dominants, reproductive cycles, hormones, pheremones - the whole thing. I loved it. Then I lost it.

I checked my computer. I checked my house. I even checked with my writer friend Olivia, because we'd gotten together earlier in the week. Nothing. It vanished. Poof. Into thin air. I came to the painful but necessary decision to rewrite it. And, boy, am I glad I did!

In the process of pulling it all back together, I discovered an incongruity. If werewolves and shifters reproductive systems only kick into gear when they meet their perfect genetic match, they would only reproduce with other weres or shifters. Anything else would be less than ideal, and would not be in keeping with species survival. So...it turns out there's a combination of genes that need to be inherited for the shifting or the were ability to be actually expressed. And that's better, because...

Our twin werewolves each "recognize" a person who is not a shifter, or not pack. However, both of these mundanes are of Italian descent. It turns out they each carry a few genes from that original Etruscan werewolf pack. Potential problem solved. Whew!

Now, how to solve the problem of writing what appears right now to be pure dreck...? Today it all seems like it's blowing chunks. I mean, do my readers really need to know what Dawar's compound looks like? I'm bored writing it, so I can only imagine people would be bored reading it.

But, I will take La Nora's advice. In a nutshell, it's this, paraphrased: vomit it out and get it on paper. You can always fix it later. But you can't edit a blank page. I'm going to try and make that my mantra. And, while I'm sitting here in the bookstore waiting for one of my students, I'm going to yank out a blank page and keep going.

(No, I'm still not caught up....)

5 comments:

Suzanne Lilly said...

Sometimes when you write pages of background material, it never goes into your story, but it adds the depth and texture that would be missing if you had never done it. Readers don't have to see all your work on werewolf genetics and setting, but it will definitely enhance your novel. Congrats on working out the details!

Dawn Montgomery said...

Absolutely love your genetics research for this book. Get the words down. Fix it later. :) You're doing great!

Keep Writing honey!!!

Jess said...

Wow, I love in-depth research like that. It calls to my nerd heart. :-) good luck this week!

Kim Switzer said...

So glad the catastrophe turned into something good and useful! Whew! Also, I would really love to read your werewolf story! It sounds like it's going to have some really interesting bits to it.

Lara said...

Thanks for the cheerleading, everyone! It's been a crazy few days, and I really appreciate the islands of sanity that I find with you.

Hope the fingers are flying for everybody!