Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Into the Reeds

I've been wrestling with my Egypt book for some time. With the completion (halleluia) of TWIFW, I have no choice, really, but to work on something new, and also I've now got an actual deadline, and I take deadlines seriously whenever possible, which it usually is.

So I'd written some stuff I liked pretty well, for a first draft, and then I hit a wall. At first it felt like a describe-Cairo kind of wall, like I would have to figure out how my POV character would experience Cairo in the 1920s. That looked like research, but of the sort that can trip writers up--you can disappear down the Cairo rabbit hole when no one actually cares about Cairo at all.

I was contemplating this when my schedule hit the fan. My son graduated, we took a lovely but oddly-timed vacation (because that was the only time we could take a vacation), and then I spoke at a conference and then I helped my son move to Chicago, and on top of all that I spent last weekend in Kentucky learning how to fall off a horse without concussing my head. So I've not done much writing beyond routine work of book reviews and conference speeches. But I had a lot of down time, travel time or what have you, to think, and what I ended up thinking was not no one actually cares about Cairo at all--though that's true, at least in the context of my hatching novel--but what's the big thing you're missing?

I thought about what I'd written so far, and I realized that one specific word leaped out at me, annoyed me each and every time I typed it, which was often. I realized I'd tried to find ways around using this particular word, but couldn't. I'm not going to tell you the word, but I realized that I'd learned a few things from the nine drafts of TWIFW, one of which is, if you don't like the emotions arising out of a situation, change the situation. Preferably before the fifth draft.

So I changed the situation to make the word I didn't like go away, and lo, there's the book. It's still a huge chunk of research and it's still not going to be easy, but it's also all good. I've spent the morning scribbling with a pencil onto paper---first my little note cards, which I love, and then, when I needed a wider space, an old cheap spiral-bound notebook. and we're all there.

Hooray, hooray, hooray.

I was in the weeds, but now I'm in the reeds: Aaru, the ancient Egyptian version of paradise as a set of small islands covered with reeds and rushes, surrounded by the life-giving Nile.

If you need me you know where to find me. I'll be here for some time.

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