And now my turn to vent!
1. So last month, I graduated university. And at the moment, I'm living with my parents, hunting for jobs, and having few other duties. I thought that this would be a rare period of productivity for me, as I haven't had a free summer in years and used to have to balance my hobbies with classes and/or work. Instead, it's been the opposite. I started off my period of freedom by bringing
Eight Cicadas out from hiatus and starting
The Chains of Lyra. Making new material for them has been slow, full of re-doing, and I honestly almost never feel the urge to write with what I have!
I can at least pinpoint why this is happening: I used to have a highly-structured life and now I don't, which doesn't help me with concentrating. I get side-tracked. But I spend a lot of time playing
Audiosurf, accumulating custom content, and chatting with friends, and
those can s.uck me in just fine!
Who else gets sidetracked easily/can't concentrate? And what do you do to help?
2. Sometimes I really hate writing a super-plot-driven story. Especially one with a framing device that
should require me to have planned and codified certain events and elements.
So here's the problem:
For non-readers,
Eight Cicadas is mostly a linear story, but it's contained within a framing device. It seems pretty simple on paper: you're reading the story with its own in-universe author, who has experienced and written down everything already. And she has a few of her own "present day" adventures that the story cuts to. Thankfully her current adventures aren't causing me much trouble. I can roll with the punches on those.
But the problem is that I really didn't plan
Cicadas enough, but I inserted a lot of foreshadowing in those "present" chapters that...really doesn't apply anymore. Sometimes it got really egregious (like dropping that they're demons, then deciding that they're demonic aliens. Or referring to a character as the narrator's grandfather and then deciding that he'll be her legal father instead). Sometimes it was just not knowing exactly what kind of character the narrator really is, especially when she's in the grungy
Cicadas world rather than adventures on her own terms.
And it's really easy to edit these things, even retroactively. But I've done a lot of that since starting
Cicadas, and I think my readers as a little tired of me not being able to leave things alone. It stinks, because I really want to change these things! Those chapters are trainwrecks!
Thoughts?
