At The Threshold

I’ve snuck away from the festivities of our neighbor’s party across the street to make a pot of tea.  The way I’ve been yawning the last couple of hours, I needed a boost of caffeine in order to make it to the stroke of midnight.  It’s been a full week since I have written anything of substance.  I expect I’ll be doing another read-through to get back in character for Til Death.  But as the old year closes out and the new is about to begin, I find myself thinking a great deal about the changes I want to make to House of Cards this next go round.  I knew about 3/4ths of the way through the book that I would be making some radical changes when I sat down to revise, but I went ahead and pushed through to the end to prove to myself and anyone else that I could finish the book.  That particular book was pretty emotionally laden for me in a lot of ways.  While the majority of the stuff that happens to Kensie never happened to me, there was still a lot of emotional exorcism connected to the story for me, and finishing it was a way of winning for me.  Now that that’s done, my characters are merely themselves and I can see in them more possibilities than I saw before.  It’s a relief.  Anyway, I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about changes that I want to make, subplots to eliminate, etc. in this next draft.  The Sweat ends in two weeks, and I won’t be anywhere near finished with Til Death at the deadline, but that’s okay.  If it continues to be stagnant, I may go ahead and take a stab at this rewrite of House of Cards.  We shall just have to see.

Since another blank page is about to begin, I suppose it’s part of the ritual to talk about resolutions.  I’ll leave off the ones relating to diet and exercise that we all make after holiday excesses and stick to the writing.  I’ve established some really good habits in terms of writing since April.  I’d like to continue these.  I began at 500 words a day and moved up to 1000 for the Sweat.  Post Sweat, I think I’m going to aim for 750 a day.  I frequently can do 1000 without a problem, but I’m about to be snowed at work, so I’d rather not have that pressure.  The important part is that I stick to writing every single day and keep up the mentally sweaty work of continuing to better myself and my craft.  I’d also love to make some kind of resolution that I read more often, as that has fallen by the wayside since I started writing daily.  I’m not sure how that’s going to fit into the schedule, but we’ll have to see.  In any event, it’s been a good year writing wise and I hope that 2008 is even more successful.

Happy New Year y’all!