I’m finished! Sadly, no, not with the novella, but today (actually yesterday by the time you read this), I knocked out the last of my lectures for the theories of personality class I’m teaching next semester. That’s TWELVE, count ’em, TWELVE lectures researched, written, scripted, and PowerPointed in 6 weeks. On top of the Evil Day Job and the Less Evil Side Teaching Jobs. My primary NaNo goal is complete! Granted, I still have to animate and record said lectures, write all the quizzes and exams, write the discussion questions, write the syllabus, create the course calendar, upload all materials to the course shell, set due dates, and write announcements, all before January 6th. Yeah, I could do the rest as I go along, but the entire point of this insanity was to make next semester easier on myself. So I still have a lot to do, BUT the rest of it (other than the test writing) won’t take NEARLY the brain power that lecture writing for a class I have never taught requires.
So tonight (last night actually), I did a full re-acquaint me read-through of the six written chapters of the novella. There was chocolate. Wine was considered. It’s offended that I ran off and left it this long, so I’m having to coax it past feelings of abandonment and rejection. But the good news is that I still love it. I’m very happy with what I have so far (despite the assortment of bracketed notes on world building stuff I still need to make up).
Then I came up against The Scene. The one I’ve been balking at for three weeks. It just wasn’t working, even though it was the next logical step in the plot. If you’re gonna storm a secret military base, you have to do reconnaissance, or you’re just flat committing suicide. But no matter how I set it up, whose head I put it in, or what details I included, it just wasn’t working. So for the heck of it, I decided to whip out the tarot cards and do a reading to see if that jarred any of my creative juices loose.
All signs point to skipping the reconnaissance mission and moving on to the next scene in which an unexpected access point presents itself. Okay, that’s fine. I just have to decide if this happens after a failed reconnaissance mission that can be summed up in a line or two of dialogue, or if they just never got that far.
And yet rather than buckle down and start on that scene, I have tweeted about the arrival of my new nephew (Gideon MacArthur, 7 pounds 7 oz. at 7:32 PM), I have done dishes, I have painted baseboards and cabinet doors in my bathroom, I have graded finals and calculated the probable curve I can pull off in both classes, I’ve sent off email, and I’ve sat down to write tomorrow’s (today’s) blog post.
It’s official. I have page fright.
