Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

I started this year with an admittedly-ambitious daily target: 1,200 a day on the faerie novel and 700 a day on a short story (which will probably end up not entirely that short). I could have aimed for a lower target, but that would have meant working on Saturdays and Sundays and one thing I learnt last year is that time off — and flexibility — are things I can't skimp on.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and as is periodically inevitable, lately I've been struggling with morale. C'est la vie.

I've hit that spot in writing a novel where the whole thing feels trivial and trifling. Although if I'm honest, it's a feeling that's been plaguing me since I can't remember when; and because I have a nasty habit of high expectations, and wanting everything I attempt to be (at least subjectively) worthwhile, the pressure for this novel to be spectacular is beginning to effect my ability to actually write the damn thing.

This novel has been difficult from the get-go, and I've come up with a hundred reasons why, and ways to fix it, but somehow none of them seem quite to explain everything. When I was writing Shadow Queen, I had a certainty that there was something about that book that would work, not just for me but for other people. Which turned into a bit of a superstition because it went on to sell, and sit on actual bookstore shelves for other people to read. So it's been bugging me that, for a long time, I haven't had a similar certainty about the faerie novel.

But superstition is not going to stop me from finishing it, for the closure if for nothing else. Perhaps that certainty will become apparent during the rewrites — it isn't wise for a writer to trust her own mindset or judgement when she's a long way into the hard slog of a novel, after all, and it's still a story I'm enjoying, which means it's still a story I believe in. (Although I have given myself permission to skip such pesky things as transitions and leave them for the next draft.)

As if to reward me for such self-enlightenment, the internet has since been sending me little reminders. One was a conversation about the power of the square bracket (hello transition which reads simply: [they go here]!), and the other was a post by John Barnes on the effort of quality:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly at first.

I've seen this advice before, of course, more often in other guises. Give yourself permission to write a shoddy first draft. Write first, edit later. You can edit shit, but you can't edit a blank page.

The post has other gems as well — I particularly liked the remark that fiction doesn't depict nearly enough failure. As an engineer and a writer, I know what it's like to smack my head against a variety of brick walls and seemingly end up nowhere, so that trying apparently-fruitless approaches seems viable and failures teach you more about your task than achievements ever could.

The last reminder (so far) has been a startling realisation, just yesterday, of what's wrong with the faeries: I don't want them to be faeries. Somewhere in this draft I'd gotten too caught up in everybody else's mythologies, and they lost their vibrancy for me. So fixing that will change everything. Again. (I've lost count of how many fundamental everything-changing realisations I've had to slog through 100,000 words for in this book.) (This time, I shall be very good and NOT go back to the start again; I shall simply make a note in the margin for the next draft and, pretending it's fixed already, and forge ahead.)

Out of curiosity, the other day I had occasion to count all the hours and words I've spent on the faerie novel to date.

The answer? 483 hours, spread over a stint of days that add up to about 3 and a quarter years. (The first word was written in 2007.) In total, I've written 168,000 words of manuscript draft, 141,000 of them from scratch. (At one point I reached 95,000 words before scrapping all of them because of a startling realisation that made them redundant. That hurt. So far it looks like I've managed to salvage about 20,000 of those 95,000, but it was in such an altered form it may as well have been from scratch as well.)

Having said that, by the time I was done with Shadow Queen (including all publication-level edits etc), I'd spent 1,143 hours, and Shadow Bound cost me 871 hours.

So looks like I'm still only halfway at best on this sucker. Onward and upward.

The other day I stumbled across a link, something along the lines of 25 ways to torment your characters, and in idly perusing this list I realised that one of the reasons I'm struggling with momentum on the faerie novel is because the characters' wants, needs and fears have evolved as part of the plot but I hadn't kept up. I need to check what's changed and what hasn't, and whether that leads to new plot.

And do you know what this means? This means I'm trudging (once again) through the dreaded Middle of the Book. Figuring shit out in the dark, with no idea how I'm going to get where I need to, or whether that's even where I still need to arrive.

And that's okay. I'm practiced at this, I know how to write a book without knowing the path.

What's not okay is that this time I wrote a synopsis. Isn't that the whole point of planning in advance? I trudged and slugged through months of trying to plan this novel in advance — one of my least favourite writing activities — specifically so I wouldn't have to feel lost in the middle and OUTLINERS, YOU LIED TO ME.

So, okay, it wasn't the world's most comprehensive synopsis. But I still maintain that's not the point.

And also, where the hell do I fit all this worldbuilding that dropped into my head while watching a show about Darwin's orchids? Huh?

It's a long weekend in my part of the world, which means I'm tucked up at home eyeballing the novel. My plan is, if I can lull it into a false sense of security by doing inconsequential errands around it, it won't notice when I start working on it, ever so gently, ever so slowly. And I'll be able to pin another few hundred words onto its bedraggled ends before it figures out a way to protest. Writing, guerilla-Frankenstein style.

It's not the cleverest method of writing, in that it tends to lead to a lot of half-completed errands. For example my breakfast this morning was a soft-boiled egg. It was not meant to be soft-boiled: I was actually aiming for hard-boiled. But I got distracted by writing thoughts, and then I couldn't remember how long the dang thing had been sitting there whistling, and anyway I was hungry, so I just fished it out and started peeling it. And then when it started running everywhere, and I had no bread to sop it up and make it delicious, I admit it: I just drank the damn thing.

It was … kinda not awesome.

This is a large part of the reason I do not trust myself to provide food to other, more normal, people.

Complain that you hate your novel, and the internet gives you possible explanations.

First it was a post by Clarissa Draper on writer's block boredom, and coping therewith¹ which made me realise I was bored. Oh, of COURSE. To be fair, I've never written to an outline before, precisely because every time I try I end up being bored, and I thought my current level of boredom was "just" because of the outline, not due to the trudgery, gotta-get-through-this-detail bit of the narrative.

To counter my boredom, I have decided to kill off a (very nice) priest, which is helping to liven things up a little.

After that, it was Rowena's post on narrative structure, linking to a discussion of linear and patterned structure by Jennifer Crusie, and that got me to wondering whether the faerie novel was supposed to be patterned rather than linear… (For the record, I don't think it is. At all, in fact. But at least it got me thinking, and I'm sure an awareness of the pattern and shape hanging above all this detail I'm currently trudging through can't hurt. And I have a feeling that, while I'm writing the bits I know linearly, I'm still going to be mulling over the larger structure for a while to come.) Like the pensive penguin I am.

Then I spent Saturday, in a random and unexpected turn of events, totally and utterly neglecting ignoring resting from my writing, including attending a party where all and sundry fondly chastised me for never taking weekends off and made me promise to schedule some downtime into my routine. I interpreted this as permission to spend Sunday totally and utterly resting from my writing. And it was glorious. And included chocolate-covered peanuts.

So. The internet/universe, it turns out, is listening. Even if it doesn't always look that way. Because the internet/universe is a bit creepy that way.

(Dear internet/universe, I would really appreciate it if my neck and shoulder muscles did not ache all. the. time. (And no fair just shifting the ache somewhere else.) Just putting that out there.)

(Also, while you're at it, I want a pterosaur of my very own. No particular rush.)

1. I really have spent too long in the dayjob. The lawyers always put there before every preposition, whether it belongs or not, and I've fallen into the same habit because I have to argue back using their own language. Therewith. Thereto. Therein. Thereat. Therebetween. That last one doesn't even exist! Lawyers, do you SEE the perversions you make me practice upon the English language? I will never forgive you.

So one of my tasks, pre departure for Europe, among the planning of itineraries and other such intricacies, is to find myself a bridesmaid dress. Internets, this is not really my forte. I have a picture of the dress I must match/complement but really, it's not like white is a difficult colour to match/complement so that's not quite as helpful as I was hoping. This weekend just gone, after discovering yet again that I had too much work on hand to leave the house, I decided to try window shopping via the internet. This was not such a good idea. I found dresses, of course — dresses which had no price listed against them (and are therefore automatically out of my price range) and which need to be ordered with up to 16 weeks notice. Oh dear. You can attend a wedding in jeans, right? Totally normal.

On the writing front, I absolutely hate and loathe the faerie novel all of a sudden. Not sure what happened: I was loving it, then not loving it but it was just a bit of a slog, and suddenly it's the worst tripe ever written. If I could be sure it was purely and simply that dreaded middle point, I could forge on ahead knowing the love will return. But alas, I cannot silence the little nagging thought that it could be a symptom of a narrative that's taken the bit between its teeth and dashed off over a cliff in the middle of the night. Which means there'll be a broken neck come morning, and no one likes cleaning up that sort of mess.

So while I wrestle with my inner editor and my inner suck-monkey, who may or may not be in cahoots or at odds, have some more local graffiti. I would dearly like to know what she's advertising, as it were.

(Hey, maybe it's a boutique bridesmaid dress and manuscript writing outfit and all my dreams are answered…?)

Today I'm working on the faerie novel. Poor oft-abandoned faerie novel, always put aside when the world wants my attention on outstanding promises. It's going well enough, if slowly. But then, writing always goes slowly, these days.

Partly it's because I commit that cardinal "sin" of editing as I go. Which is really only a sin, at least for me, if I'm writing my first novel (so, scratch that as an excuse) or if I'm so stalled on the current novel that it simply won't move ahead. But I've learned that all I need to do, when my brain gets stuck in a negative editing loop, is to open a new blank document (a consequence-free-zone, if you will) and dump whatever's troubling me in there, without worrying about making it pretty or workable. Normally it ends up being an instruction to myself — don't forget she's on heroin; eyes? speech? reaction time? was one of this morning's notations. Once it's down, I can edit it with a little more objectivity and focus, which is of course the reason beginning writers are often urged to write first, edit later. I heeded that advice, myself, for my first couple of novels. Now that I'm confident I know how to finish a novel, I find I prefer to edit as I go whenever possible. Because in the end there's only one inviolable rule of writing: WHATEVER WORKS (FOR THIS NOVEL). It's finding whatever works that's the trick.

Because the faerie novel just presented me with a fight scene I'm not entirely sure how to tackle, and I'm still trying to decide whether we find the (fourth) dead body now, or later, I thought I'd take a break and give you all another bird picture, this time of Bernice the Black-Breasted Buzzard.

When on the ground she likes to run and she does it … well, kind of like a fanged chicken, actually.

This synopsis is utterly and unequivocally wiping the floor with me.

Forgive me, my lovely internets, for spending so long away from you! (And, um, promise you'll forgive me for only briefly checking in before I dash away again?)

I did however find one of the world's better 'No Entry' signs while I was away, which I offer for your amusement:

Mostly lately I've been working, when I could snatch a moment to myself, on a synopsis for the faerie novel. Given I haven't finished the novel, and don't plan my novels in advance, writing a synopsis at this point in my process is … not coming easily, to say the least.

I'm finding it surprisingly draining. The story always feels forced, when I need to figure things out before the characters actually experience it, and I never trust that I've got it right. But after much grinding of teeth (quite literally — all this novel-plotting is making me grind my teeth while I sleep) I think I've figured out the important plot points.

Well, everything except the, er, climax.

Yanno, no biggie.