Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

I should know by now that "I am up to my elbows in dishwater" is not a good reason to fail to write something down. There was an insight into The True Tale of Carter Hall, and now it's gone. Fee. Come back, little insight! Join your friends!

The other insight, which is not gone, can be summed up in an index card reading, "Earlier Wild Hunt snowmobile deaths." So there's that at least.

The impulse to restructure the entire book is such a seductive one. I should remember that next time it hits. It nearly allows a reset to the beginning of the process, when all things seem possible, and also it means that the wibbling I'm doing is productive, creative wibbling, except when it totally isn't. This happened with What We Did to Save the Kingdom, too: "Maybe I need a second POV character!" No, you don't. "Maybe I need extensive flashback structure so that each chapter comes with a bit of the protag's past!" No. No, you don't. Write the book. Don't think, meat, just pitch. And stop breathing out the wrong eyelid. I mean William Blake.

I have no idea how people who don't have Bull Durham and Galaxy Quest in their brain write books, truly I don't. It's not that I don't believe there's a way, because of course there's a way. I did it myself, when I was 11 and again when I was 14. It's just that I don't remember how it goes any more. What gets you through revisions when you get to the middle of the book and spontaneously rant, "This scene was badly written," and then you don't think of Sigourney Weaver and grin? I'm not sure. I'm just glad to have it to hug to myself and move on.