Freedom Is Scary

School's out for summer, if I may quote Alice Cooper (and why not?). I graded all the exams and have wiped the chalk dust from my hands.

And now I'm free to write. How thrilling! How terrifying! No excuses, nothing in my way. Hope I can be a grown-up about this, rather than a kid in a candy story, munching everything in sight and making myself sick. The writerly equivalent would be writing a little bit of lots of things and finishing nothing. Or worse, thinking about writing lots of things and not actually doing it because I'm overwhelmed.

Trying to make goals, reasonable goals, for each day and each week. At the very least my adult SF novel will get finished, since I'm drafting chapter 18 now. The trick is to decide what other projects to work on.

Pretty nice problem to have, eh?

Author Blog Hop: Do You Write in Logical Order?

Thanks to Amy Romine for this interesting blog hop question.

There are two issues in answering the question:

First, what is meant here by "writing"? Are writing and drafting the same? Perhaps the question is: Do I draft in the order in which the material will eventually be read? The answer to that, of course, is that I can't know while I'm drafting whether that will be the final order of the prose or the final logic of the story. In any case, whether or not I write each scene in the order that I assume it will be used, I do have a sense of that order in my head, even if I write the prose for the last scene before I write the first scene.

Secondly, if by "logical," the question is asking whether I tell a story in temporal order, event by event, then I would say, yes, usually, but there are certainly exceptions such as flashbacks. My temporal appoach on the whole is conventional, although I admire authors who can fragment or even dispense with time in their storytelling. That's really tricky to do well.

Thanks again. It's been fun to think about this!