Right now, I'm working on finishing this years NaNo novel, a sequel to my first book, Dimensional Games. (Now available on Amazon, for the Kindle, and the Nook sorry for the shameless plug, but Iced Mochas don't pay for themselves) As part of my process, I usually go back and read a few random chapters to help me recapture the tone of the book. Well, I was doing that today and came across the following rant masquerading as "Chapter 24":
Okay reader, why don’t you come over here for a moment… we need to have a little chat.I’ve been sitting here for what feels like hours, pouring my heart out onto the page, only to feel like I’m writing absoulute crap. Is it crap? It very well may be, but it’s my crap.
I know that I have asked you to make a few incredible leaps of faith with me in these pages thus far… I’ve got dimension hopping, dimension bleeding, dimensional inertia, and half a dozen other half-assed, not entirely fleshed out concepts that I’m hoping that you will swallow, hook line and sinker based soley on my say so.
Well, I’ll tell ya reader, it ain’t easy. I just realized that I actually wrote that a giant ship of vampires is barreling down on our heroes, sprung from no where but my imagination, and have introduced more than a few plot twists to your devouring eyes in the past thousand words or so, and quite frankly it’s too much for even me.
This, dear reader is what you call the “despair” part of writing a novel. Sure, to you it seems a well thought out construct of plot and character melting together into a nice, gooey, easy to swallow chutney for your reading pleasure.
What I want to take the time to say now is that it’s not. I have no idea where the Giovannica storyline is going right now… I feel like I have way too many characters for you to keep up with, (much less care about), and quite frankly, the fact that my main character has thus far been a bit of a whiney bitch about his “relationship” with his love intrest is pissing me right off. My Protagonist isn’t your typical james bondian hero… he was written expressly with the average joe in mind, and isn’t really prone to whisking anyone away for a romantic cruise.
Yeah, all of that was a plot device, but I figure I can fix all that in the rewrite. Ray Bradbury once said that there is no such thing as a successful writer… what you see is lots of successful re-writers. That’s all well and good, but this November as I write this novel, I feel like the entire world is collapsing around me. The electric bill is due, the kids just got a goddamn puppy that everyone seems to be asking me to take care of (WHEN I HAVE A NOVEL TO WRITE) and I have yet to make dime one from my writing efforts, despite the fact that I sit here in my booth at the coffee shop day after day with an iced mocha in front of me and my Ipod rocking its way into my brain, trying valiantly to entertain you, The frickin reader.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the fact that you’ve taken the time out to read these words, which realistically I will probably delete long before this book makes it to it’s final draft, but If I have to listen to the two teenagers in the booth behind me argue for one more fucking second about whether “I’m too sexy” by right said fred is inappropriate wedding music I’M GONNA LOSE MY SHIT!
Let me let you in on a little secret I try not to share with anyone… all of us writers are borderline insane. In a very real way, we pay attention to the voices in our heads that we jokingly refer to as our ‘Muse’. Well, right now, my muse is grumpy as hell. He hasn’t gotten laid in at least a week or so because of a damn puppy that whines when it’s left alone, and therefore MUST sleep in bed with him and his wife, and to top things off, she just started her period.
Yeah, that’s where my muse is right now. I’ve considered just killing off all the main characters, torching the dimension they live in, and making the Werewolf stay on the papers till she’s freaking housebroken.
None of which you would find the slightest bit entertaining…. And rightfully so. You paid for this book, and deserve to be entertained. If you’re reading this in a library, go to hell.
Well… I think I’m done with my rant and pity party…let’s get back to it, shall we? I’m dying to see where I’m going with all of this.. maybe we’ll get lucky and those statues from chapter twenty will show up again and do something funny.
Like I said, loopy. I'm tempted to leave it in there, but I'll probably just edit it out... People may not like a whiny bitch hero, but they like whiny bitch writers even less.
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