"I Plan To Start"

Gotta love the Reddit posters who ask for marketing tips before they've written one word of their novel. I know most of these guys are kids, and it's kind of cute. When I was a teenager I had a few aspirations that I just knew would come to fruition, even though I put no thought into how it would happen. It just would.

Even at my age I tend to ruminate on the easier parts of the publishing process, when I'll be lucky to have Second Chance written and edited by the end of the year. Most people like "easy". Sure, challenges are good, too, but challenges are so fraught with the likelihood of failure that it's easier to imagine the book being complete than actually completing it. In my mind, my book will be awesome. I'm not confident how to make that happen. It just will.

Writing is fun, but it's also drudgery. Being an impatient person, I chafe at writing "building" scenes (I don't actually know the proper term for scenes that support the action, so I'm going with my own.) Being a non-planner, I force myself to write them and hope that a tiny spark might ignite; a sentence or two that at least foreshadows something important. Those are the scenes that take the longest to write, because many times they require research. They're background, like, for example, my whole tour bus scenario. I spent far too much time on it because I began clueless and had to search out articles and videos relating to entertainers' tour buses, a topic that's boring (to me). Since I've sworn off scene jumping, though, the bus experience was the next logical scene. Drudgery. And I find myself wondering if readers will be just as bored reading it as I am writing it. I hope not. I do try to include that "spark".

If I loved every aspect of writing, I'd be far more prolific than I am. As you know if you've been reading this blog, I can sometimes spend three or four hours writing and only produce a few paragraphs. Most authors seem to hate the editing component the most. Generally that's not an issue for me, because I edit as I go, but it will arise this time around since I will need to edit (heavily) Part 1. But at least most of the words will already be there.

Be it editing or writing the boring parts or planning or research, there is always something about authoring a book that's drudgery. If there was a magic way to make those tasks interesting, writing would be a pure joy. 

The only magic I know is to just start.