goes from smug to disgruntled in .5 hours

[dragonlady7]

Was quite smug from comments received on Fall of Gondolin fic-fragment posted last night. That lasted through a while this morning. More than half an hour, actually-- it was several hours, but I couldn't explain it to Dave.
And during this time I sat down and tried to finally Deal With Chapter Eight Which Hath Suckéd My Soul.

I was writing merrily along for about fifteen minutes on it at work yesterday, and then I hit a line that sounded familiar, and I thought to myself, "Shit, I've already written this scene." So I hunted through the other fragments on the Newton, but none of them were the scene I was thinking of. I pulled out the tens of thousands of words on the sheets I'd printed on my dying printer, pink or blue or green or brown nearly illegible because the black cartridge, though brand-new, doesn't work. ($40 down the shitter. Yay!) And no, the scene I was thinking of wasn't there either.
No.
It's on my computer.
And no, I can't put it on the Newton because the thing doesn't have enough memory. And even if I could, I couldn't look at it at the same time as I was looking at the other scene, and so I'd have to switch back and forth between the old one and new one, and just you try to get anything done that way. I can't. I have to have my windows side-by-side. I'm not smart enough to work any other way. I'm sorry if that makes me retarded: I am.

So, the Vikings Novel is not getting caught up on. I need to be able to sit in front of a real computer to work on it, and I don't have one I can bring to the Club, and I don't have any fucking days off so I can do this not in the club, so oh fucking well. (Dave offered to loan his laptop, but he made the offer with such bitter anger that there's no fucking way I'm taking him up on it. "You could set up a login and put your programs on my computer," I suggested, and he rejected that. If I took his computer, he'd have to sit at home alone in the dark and accomplish nothing, and I don't think I'd be able to deal with that. And anyway, why should he suffer from my own limitations in work methods? He's got shit to do that's important, and there's no reason my life's goal should take precedence over his.)

I got home and looked at the other scene, and yes it is similar but none of it can directly be reused. I need to read the first and compose the second (nothing can be copy-pasted but fragments can be reused if rephrased), and I need a real computer to do that, and I have no time to sit in front of a real computer, unless I cut out the only pleasures I have in my life which are e-mail and LJ. And fuck that. The only time I have real conversations are on there, and the only stuff i write that people actually read and care about is on there. This novel is so unrewarding and tiring and just plain frustration-inducing that I can't even stand to look at it right now. And it doesn't help that I hate my fucking life. Yes. Time for guts-spewing, apparently, as I can't keep a train of thought on its tracks right now.

Sigh. So I'm never going to finish this fucking novel. Chapter 8 won't be finished before I leave for work; there's over 3000 words that need to be rewritten and I'm not sure how. And I can't do it at work because I can't, I just can't work like that. I have to be able to see both drafts. At the same time. And I have tried the other way. And I can't do it. So fucking shoot me already. I know I'm retarded. I just am. UGH.

I don't have a day off until next week. It kills me to miss another week, it fucking kills me. The only goddamned goal I currently have in my life and I can't even get my shit together enough to meet it.

...


So there you have it: complete and total failure of all life goals. Isn't being a drama queen fun? No, no it isn't, really.

I'll make an attempt at making lemonade out of lemons or whatever, and make a poll, since my paid-user status is coming up on expiration and I might as well enjoy it while I have it.

Some have complained that the Vikings Novel updating on Monday makes it hard for them to get to it, because they're busy all week. So, what day of the week would be better, since I'm completely off my schedule anyway? And it's not like i know what my work schedule will be like, so there's little point in basing it off that either.


[Poll #445753]


*Note my boundless optimism and faith that somebody is going to care. It gets me through the day, people. Don't knock it.

Comments

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I think you should stop beating yourself up over not writing the novel quickly enough. People take years over these things, especially if they have a job as well.

Could any of the following work:

Printing out the scene you need to work on and looking at the printout while writing on the Newton.
Rewriting a scene not as a whole, but paragraph by paragraph. (This is how I usually work. Although sometimes I have to rearrange the old paragraphs first, losing a few and inserting little descriptive stubs in between the rearranged paragraphs where new ones need to get written.
Working on your computer for an hour--two hours a day, and using those hours to get the most complicated revising done, and using the Newton to write new stuff or do small line-by-line edits at work.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

>years

I know. But I spent almost all of last year spending great swathes of time on a novel attempt that didn't turn out at all, and missed every goal I set, and feel the urgent need to actually finish something to prove to myself and to my (healthily skeptical) boyfriend that I'm serious about this novel crap.
Much of my problem, however, may lie in my total inability to set realistic goals. I mean, I wrote the first draft in 24 days. I am capable of writing quite competent things very quickly. But that doesn't mean I can finish anything at all. And it drives me up the wall.

>a job as well
One of the reasons I'm at this job is that it requires almost none of my brain cells. I don't sit at a computer, i don't try to think of clever ways to phrase things; therefore, I am fresh as a daisy when I get home. So I have no reason not to be working on this novel, and the quantities of fanfic I've managed to produce highlight that painfully. I can churn out 20,000 words of fanfic in a week, but I can't revise (not even compose!) one lousy 4500-word chapter? But if I make myself do it, I'm unhappy, and so far I'm going to have to redo the seven I managed to make myself do. So I'm getting nowhere.

>any of the following work

I've tried the printouts. But I have to change so much that the printouts don't help. The more I work on the Newton, the more the manuscript winds up in multiple versions in multiple places, and I'm so disorganized... I just can't get a handle on so much material unless I have it all in one place, and the carrying-printouts-back-and-forth-to-work solution scrambles that hopelessly. I can't edit on paper, I have all these scribbled notes that I wind up re-creating when I can't find them and then I'm just wasting effort, I end up deciding to squash two scenes together and then I don't have the manuscript of the one I need-- and I can't carry very much to work with me, as I have to schlep it all (along with my cash drawer and the Newton) through airport security. (Yes. I have to get metal-detected daily. I get to cut in line but the looks I get... can you imagine if I had two bags? The passengers would beat me. As it is I don't dare wear a belt.)

And I think I'm just in a bad place in my head, as far as the novel goes. I don't want to take a break from it, but I don't like it. I reread parts of it and they're OK, but I think about the whole thing and it just doesn't seem as interesting or well-written as anything else I've written. I only had three people who were actually reading the beta, and only one of them actually reads every chapter and comments (although a bunch of people voted in the poll, to my knowledge only one of those actually reads the novel), and only one person even moderately objected when I started letting the schedule slip. Which says to me, they're not that interested either. So I just can't scrape together the motivation. Fanfic is the only thing I've ever finished, the only thing people have been really pleased to read, and is thus the most rewarding thing to work on. Since my job and life are at the moment so unrewarding, maybe I just don't have the endurance to slog through an unrewarding novel at the moment? I don't know.
I do know that the rest of this wretched week in the Club is going to be spent writing purely for fun. Anything that springs into my head and wants written, gets written. So fling your plotbunnies while ye may.

And the content of this comment is pretty much the post I was too silly and weary to write last night, so I am probably going to go write it as a post now. Pardon my unoriginality.

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I'll reply to other bits elsewhere, but I just wanted to say that, for me, revision is far harder and more time-consuming than composition. At least 90% of my writing time is spent on revision. I don't know about other people, but from what I have seen in writing guides this sort of experience is not uncommon.