Monday, November 15, 2004

Backtracking

This was just another chilly, rainy work day, semi-productive, not great. But I did come to a fairly important decision, I think. When I started this book I thought I would change my style a little on it, just to keep things interesting. That's one of the advantages of writing house-name books: as long as you stay reasonably close to the established formula, you can do all sorts of playing around with style and characters. Anyway, fifty pages into this one in my "new" style, I hate it, and it's taking me longer than usual, and I'm smart enough to call a halt to this failed experiment. I'm going to go back and revise that first fifty pages into my regular style and write the rest of it the way I normally would have. It's always good to try new things, but you've got to be able to recognize when they're not working.

Also, I'm distracted anyway because a few days ago Livia gave me a great idea for a book and I'm spending too much time thinking about it rather than the one I'm working on. What I need is more hours in the day. (Yeah, me and the rest of the world, I know.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey James,

that's what we all need! I'm all the time too busy writing newspaper articles and stuff and I have some dozen or twenty great ideas for novels circling in my head!

Juri