Conundrum

I've been working on building my story skeleton a la Story Engineering. Anyone who read my previous post knows I've been having a great deal of fun with the "what if" questions.

That led me to something of an epiphany today. The more I think about my story, and the more intricate it needs to get to reach the end, the more storylines I actually have.

How do I fix that? Things look all muddled, like a plate of spaghetti, when I reach the middle. For instance, I realized yesterday that a scene I liked, which I included because it illustrated the burgeoning relationship between protagonist and lover, may or may not be necessary. How can you tell? Or...how can you tell if it has enough "oomph"?

Now, I could be asking these questions because I only managed to get a couple of hours of sleep last night. My roommate (who goes out gaming on Saturday afternoons) and I decided to go to Walmart in the middle of the night to get hurricane stuff. (Thanks, Isaac!) Then I had to get up because a friend needed to see me.

Or it could just be that I'm tired enough to let the questions loose.

I go back to work tomorrow. I've been assigned 8 classes this semester, but I won't have any students until Tuesday. So maybe I'll get some more work done then.

See you all on Wednesday! (Yawning and waving goodnight)

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....)