I Hate My Book Day

I am totally having an “I Hate My Book” Day. You know, one of those days (generally following a really difficult scene) when you don’t like anything you’ve written. It all feels stale and hackneyed and not at all unique. Your characters seem flat (even when they mostly aren’t) and your words are just–meh. I finished that love scene last night. And for the most part–I hate it. This is a good point for me to step away from the keyboard. Because I’ll just keep dicking around with the same scene I ceased to feel two days ago and it will only make things worse. I’m pissed at my manuscript. My manuscript and characters are pissed at me. I feel frustrated and completely and totally inadequate to the task at hand.

This is not a good place to be on the eve of Sweat Round 3.

It isn’t helping to remind myself that I do actually really like this new version of the story. I didn’t hate it until I got sucked into this God-forsaken love scene. You know, it baffles me. It really does. I can do psychological profiling until I’m blue in the face. I can totally immerse myself in the mind of a killer, describing atrocities committed on the human body (living and dead) by a sick, twisted mind–and I can even capture with fairly chilling accuracy, the sexual punch that has for the killer. Questions of my sanity aside, that isn’t me. I’ve never met or talked with serial killers (though I’ve researched them exhaustively). So why is it I am so able to do that, but I have such difficulty writing love scenes? Maybe because I’m happily married and my love life is not this angsty. Who the hell knows.

I have a short list of problems to work through–things I know are wrong. The scene feels rushed because I hadn’t planned on it, so the groundwork hasn’t been properly laid. That’s one of the big problems. So next step is to start from the beginning, reread and see where I can weave in the necessary foundation so that this scene feels inevitable. Then I’ll come back to it and…we’ll see. Hopefully I can get through this before I hit the ground running with Sven tomorrow.

 

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