Let it be known that, at 89,110 words, I am shutting the current draft of Derelict down and doing a ground-up rewrite. (Oh, and I think I’m over my writer’s block.)
I don’t like to blog about writer’s block when I have it. It’s almost like writer’s block is some sort of shameful thing which, if I was a REAL writer, I’d be able to overcome. (To some extent this is the case. Being a professional means having deadlines, and staying a professional means keeping them.)
I’ve been blocked pretty bad on Derelict for a while now. I’m not anymore. Part of this is that I now have a decent laptop on which to write, meaning I can write wherever the flip I want. Part of this is that I’ve started working on other projects I have in my head. You’d think working on three completely different books at once would mean that I’m getting less done on the main project, but in this instance that’s not the case. (Mostly because anything > 0. Results may vary when I finish being not blocked.) Another part of me being un-blocked is that I had a nice chat with my sister-in-law on the topic of writing, and that got me thinking about it again. (I wrote about a thousand words that night for the first time in months. Yay.)
What finally fully unblocked me, though, is a product of my becoming partially unblocked. Digging through the document again, I’ve come to the conclusion that Derelict needs a much larger rewrite than I was originally planning. Simply put, I’m gutting the oldest parts of the plot. The characters and core idea of the original short story are being carried forward; the plot, which I’ve been trying to make into the plot of the first part of the novel, isn’t. It just doesn’t fit anymore.
So, today I’m starting a new file for Derelict. This file currently contains — hang on, lemme count — yeah. This file currently contains zero words. I am going to rebuild Derelict in it, and it will grow quickly at first; I would guess that somewhere around 60% of the old document will fit into the new one with a minimum of rewriting (albeit some significant rearranging). Some scenes will have to be discarded entirely. (Some scenes I was pretty sure I was going to discard when I wrote them, but that’s the nature of the beast.) There will be quite a lot to write anew, but I’m looking forward to it.