A plan

I cried to sympathetic looks from Carl, took a shower and bemoaned that I can’t just go out and get drunk (although I am seriously thinking of figuring out how to go out and dance tonight), and got myself a nice bowl of panner makhani as comfort food (I wish I had palak paneer, but you know, you could practically have ‘shit paneer’ and it would be good and this is why I keep those little vaccuum pouches around my house).

First, why this news is bad, high drama stuff: consider that on the scale of marketability where Dan Brown is a hundred, my book was at about 10.  But now it probably just fell to a 2.  And no, selling it is not the WHOLE point but it is a point. I didn’t expect fame and fortune but I might like it, you know, in print. That is the point of writing. To be read.

(Also the movie trailer would seem to indicate they fucked up BtT which is even worse. But I digress back into my MASSIVE FIT I AM HAVING. Ahem.)

I have no idea how to really evaluate it anyway, but I do know in my head, where I am, it is the deluge of evil fate raining upon my parade. I have all these statements running through my mind that start “and to think.” “And to think that I stayed up until 11 on Thursday working on Scene X!” “And to think that I was just talking happily on Wednesday about being close to finishing!”

But I have a plan. It is not a grand plan, it is a survival plan. At least I excel at those. (The irony being that this novel was almost dead when it became the survival plan for making it past Emily’s death.)

There is only one way past creative angst, real or imagined, and that is to create.

So I will set the book aside for one month. (I’d thought of rushing to finish it before this movie comes out, but it is really too late for that despite the agent’s name in hand, etc.  It wouldn’t even be through editorial before this movie comes out if it were accepted tomorrow. Any sensible editor would kill it, or ask for a major rewrite. Which I will think about later.)

During that time I will participate in NaNoWriMo, a project that I have not really thought much of because although I see the value in throwing up a draft, I don’t really entirely see the value of throwing up a draft under that kind of – lack of time to let things percolate and be organic. Until now. Right now it seems like a brilliant idea to just keep writing.

So I will write the chintzy thriller I’ve thought of writing for the last couple of years, and see if I can’t write a lot of it in a month, despite the idiocy of doing this right now in the midst of night feedings and working 20 hrs a week and my father in law’s visit and everything else. Maybe that craziness will work in my favour, because I won’t notice how bad the writing is in the fog of tired.  

And the at the end of that time I will have some clarity about where to go next, I think.

The only good thing is that I do know what my next literary book will be about but I don’t yet know any of the people involved, etc. But I can see that if the decision is to put this one aside (oh god! no! my baaaaaby!) then I will at least know what to write next.

But god. It does not take a shrink to point out that this hits my Emily buttons. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, again!