In A Quandry With My Quarto

I thought I would take a break from the perpetual chop blocks that I've been giving myself as of late, and turn to writing about what I'm currently up to. Don't get me wrong, it's been mighty fun dwelling on the past, but I'm sure that everyone is just a tad curious on what I've been up to in the here and now.

The one thing that has been the proverbial 1,000lb goril-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lil-lla jamming up my brain and clogging up my sinuses and causing me to do all kinds of writing related exercises under the sun, and in fact has been slowly driving me around the bend and over the cliff, which overall has been a never ending source of paralysis, and in fact has caused me to write this ungodly run-on sentence while I'm trying to figure out a suitable ending.....feh, feh, feh.

Feh, feh, feh, blah, blah, blah, blah....oh hell, just get on with it G.

Synopsis.

I've been doing all kinds of crazy things with my writing because frankly, I'm scared shitless about writing a synopsis for my book. I have completed another round of editing and printed out almost three dozen new pages for it, copied that version over and started tweaking the language so that I would have a semi-clean and a unclean version at my fingertips; I have worked on a brand new story that has grown to 65+ pages (which I just put aside for the time being); and I even started editing another story which M&M was thoughtful enough to critique for me a month ago.

All of this was done because I've been unable to face doing the one thing that would take me from the level of being a blogger who wants to be a writer (notwithstanding the one short I have published so far) to the entry level position of a writer who happens to be a good blogger. And in order to accomplish that, I really need to have a synopsis for my book.

Unlike last time, in which I seriously didn't know what the hell I was doing and did everything that you could possibly imagine wrong for querying/submissions (some day I will write a post about that too), this time I did a little research and found a nice primer on how to write a synopsis. So I got that little item sitting in my notebook of pen and paper (in all honesty, I find that I can concentrate better writing stuff by hand as opposed to writing on a computer, notwithstanding this particular blog post, which of course is actually being written as we speak), and of which is an accomplishment in itself because I printed out that little primer about three months ago.

And for the next three months, there it sat in either my notebook of paper or in the binder containing the finished product gathering dust bunnies. And during that time, I did what I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, and I was happy.

Truth is, I was miserable. I had a great story, nicely written, nicely critiqued and edited to death three times over and yet, I couldn't pull the trigger to take the next step. Yup, I was a charter member of Procrastinators-R-Us.

So what finally made me decide to start working on it after all this time?

The main reason as to why I decided to take my game to the next level is that I was coming up on my one year anniversary of when I first jotted down the sentence, "I need an extension."

Yup, Super Bowl Sunday 2010 is when I started writing this thing and although I know that to most writers out there, one year spent writing a novel can be the equivalent of spending a calendar month writing short stories, to me spending a year working on a novel is about ten months too long. Yeah, I know that to spend only two months writing a novel sounds wrong, to me it really isn't. I spent about two months writing this book, which is only about one-third of the time I spent writing Shades of Love, and for me, those were the longest two months I'd ever spent doing something that I truly enjoyed.

Honestly, I don't enjoy procrastination on any kind of level. I'm the kind of person who likes to complete tasks that are set before him (notwithstanding the writing aspect of my life) no matter how challenging it may be, and I have a tendency to get very OCD/anal when I can't do complete a particular project that was assigned to me (yeah, I know, writing is not a good hobby/career to pursue when you have OCD/anal retentiveness as it applies to work).

So I decided that starting tomorrow, instead of hibernating after lunch to work on my latest writing project, or even to work on this blog, I will hibernate in my den (I'm very anti-social when it comes to holidays), whip out my pen, paper, notes, manuscript and start my first attempt at writing a coherent synopsis (I already have one that isn't coherent for Shades of Love and you better hope and pray that I don't post it elsewhere and show everyone how not to write a synopsis, 'cause its 8 pages of dreck).

I say start, because I have Friday off (unpaid furlough day), Saturday off, and Sunday off, and I plan on working on this damn thing for the entire four day weekend.

I'm not sure how this is gonna end up in the long run because not only I am terrible at writing outlines for my stories (How terrible? I didn't even write an outline for this book. I had a premise and I had an ending. Everything else, and I do mean everything, in between was created on the fly as I went along), but I am horrendous at summarizing.

As the incredibly tired yet completely accurate cliche states, every journey starts with the first step. But if this journey starts with the first step, why is the distance between every single one of those steps measures the length of a football field?