Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Dead Lines

The worst part of this gig is the waiting.


Let me be clear; I am talking about the wannabe writer gig. The worst part about archaeology is the sketchy income and the poison ivy. But in writing, my personal demon is time.

I have no deadlines, except the ones I give myself. Some might consider this a luxury, and that's just dandy for them. I hate it. It means that instead of some nice, reasonable editor person setting my expectations, I get the voices in my head.

"You'll spend your whole life like this, you know. Tapping and tapping and tapping away, with nothing to show for it. Nobody cares about the never-weres."

"You could die tomorrow. Do you really want to die without this story finished?"

"How long has it been since you've done something that impressed anyone? Honestly. We really should find another gig."

"You could die tomorrow."

"You could die tomorrow."

"You could die tomorrow."

I am afraid that I will die without having added a single breath to the universe.

I'll take your deadlines over mine any day.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Er. I know this is a year late, but I thought I had readerly obligation to comment.

I found the link to your blog from Authonomy, where I'm thoroughly enjoying Dragon Baine. It's currently on my bookshelf. It's the only thing I've found all afternoon that was worth reading.

You aren't writing to your eyes only, to the Void, or to the faceless masses. You're writing to readers you haven't yet met, who are meeting you for the first time through your work. There's a difference.

I'm only on the fifth chapter, but I foresee good things. I'm actually amazed you managed to wrap up this much in 60k words. Is this a stand-alone work, or will there be further books in this world?

If you need more concrete goals, there's nothing that can beat National Novel Writing Month. I imagine you've heard of it already, but on the off chance that you haven't, it's definitely something worth checking out. (In a nutshell, it's a worldwide challenge to write 50,000 words of fiction during the month of November. Hundreds of thousands of people participate each year).

I'll be surprised if you read this -- goodness knows I don't keep tabs on my own year-old blog entries -- but if you ever stumble across it, I hope it helps.

-- Natalie

 
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