Perfection ain't all it's cracked up to be

I took Friday as a vacation day from my day job to give me a 3-day writing weekend on Bewitched & Betrayed (aka B&B). Actually it was going to be a 3-day plotting weekend. And it was -- kind of. I'd just finished writing Chapter 9 and realized that I really needed to stop and plot out at least the next few chapters (though I was really aiming for the rest of the book).

Well, that did and didn't happen.

The goal was to type into my laptop all of the notepad pages of brainstorming that I'd written over the past week or so. I had a lot more pages than I thought, and naturally as I was typing my notes into the chapters where they needed to go, more ideas came to me. That pretty much ate up Friday and part of Saturday. I spent Saturday evening going through my Big Notes File (110 pages worth) to copy and paste any scenes I thought I wanted to use in the next section of the book. Done. Then on Sunday, I was going to really dive in on plotting the next chunk of chapters.

Didn't happen.

What did happen? I wrote almost the first half of Chapter 10. Completely unplanned, but apparently the timer went off and Chapter 10 was ready to come out of the oven. Who am I to hold up progress? ; )

That's pretty much how this book is going -- I plan to do one thing, and I end up doing something else entirely. And believe me, that's not a bad thing; this is shaping up to be a very cool book. Lots of characters' pasts are coming to the surface, most notably Tam and Mychael, and some of Raine's. A lot of Raine's past will surface in the next book.

The way I've always written a book is: I write a chapter, get it as perfect as I can, and then and only then move on. That's not happening with this one. I'm doing the writing version of Impressionistic painting. I'm getting the story on the page, but perfection has to wait. Normally once I reach a certain point, and I go back and start polishing earlier chapters before I've even finished the book. Not this time. This time I'm going back and adding notes to myself about changes I want to make to the chapter, but actually making the changes is gonna have to wait. I've got a story to write. ; )

Normally this entire approach (writing by the seat of my pants) would be freaking me out. It's not. Heck, I'm not even freaking out that I'm not freaking out. Most unusual, but definitely welcome. I've discovered that a non-freaking out brain is a happy and creative brain. And it's making for a really good book. Perfection definitely ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Lisa