Writing Road Block
Ah, August, when the days grow sultry and professors start to panic….
I’ve spent the last few days copyediting a handful of manuscripts for a conference issue of a journal that I’m guest-editing. I wanted to get that step out of the way before the new semester, so I could concentrate on syllabus-writing and lecture-revising. Today, however, I decided to turn back to my revising of King’s Monster, promising myself that I’d come in over the weekend to do the semester prep work I’m ditching today.
Unfortunately, now I realize that the chapter I’d planned to insert isn’t going to work out. I thought it would be an easy addition that would require minimal tweaking of the text later on, but now that I take a closer look, I realize that adding it will rip deeply into the way events unfold throughout the rest of the book. It’s like deciding to add a new room to a house only to realize that doing so will require rewiring and replumbing the whole thing.
Not exactly my goal, given how many times this particular house has been rewired over the years. Now that the darn thing is done, I’m loath to do any more major restructuring if there’s any way to avoid it. So now I have to figure out if I can insert the information the new chapter was going to handle in some other, less story-destructive manner. Sigh. Maybe I should have written syllabi today, instead!
drupagliassotti @ August 14, 2008