Patience

But first:

I’ve entered Weronika Janczuk’s contest for an autographed copy of MISERERE: AN AUTUMN TALE, Teresa Frohock’s debut dark fantasy. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/lL7kFw.

It looks like a great book, but as I haven’t read it yet, I don’t know. I’m definitely going to buy a copy if I don’t win this one.

And how fitting that my post on patience got interrupted. I think I can sum up my entire relationship with the virtue of patience in three words: I have none. 

Oh sure, I can wait my turn in the grocery store, and I never, ever hurry waiters, checkers, clerks or service people of any kind. That kind of patience I have in spades. No, I’m talking about the patience one needs in writing. That’s what I lack. 

I have these stories, and I so desperately want to tell them that I just can’t wait. I can’t wait to jump right in and get to the action of telling a story. I hate setting up the world, but I love the stories I get to tell there. I actually go through and read books where I think the author has patiently set up her(his) world to best execute a story. I read them as a constant reminder of what I should be doing, and I have the full knowledge that I’m not. I can’t wait to get to the good stuff in my story. I’ve gotten better over the years, and strangely, this is one of the areas where academics has really helped. It’s not enough. I want to get to the end of the book now. I’m inpatient. 

I’ve had another strike of lightning, a whole book has leapt into my head (Title, characters, everything, and I’ll put something down about this book when I start writing it), and I can’t wait to get started, except, here I am in the middle of telling another story. So I’m biding my time trying to be, you know, patient with myself. I’m trying to give my WIP the time and space it needs, because it’s a great big story with lots of fun and wonderful characters. I have to describe new places all the time because my scenes are happening all over the place, and I need a stage for my stories. Still, I have this other story that’s beating down the insides of my skull. Talk about tearing out my fingernails one by one, it’s complete torture. 

Then, because that wasn’t enough to tax my sad little abilities of waiting to getting around to telling my SNI, I changed the first chapter of my query bait. That means I have to go through the whole thing to make sure it’s consistent. So, the ‘free’ time that I usually use to write, and would be using to write this story that’s currently occupying my time, I’m reading through a manuscript I’ve nearly edited to death. 

So, all my writing is on hold while I make sure I have an internally consistent manuscript (it’s a really big deal in academics to have internally consistent models, so much so that I can’t bring myself to query without a read through to be 100% certain that I don’t have a blatant mistake in there now. It’s that important to catch the two references to the different first chapter). 

Before I can get to my shiny new idea, I have to finish off reading through my query bait, finish my first draft of my current project, then I can begin to think about putting my SNI to paper. I’m going to go bald with the anticipation to tell this story. 

Okay, probably not. I’ve managed to hold myself in check before, but this feeling like I can’t wait to start writing something is a good sign. A really good sign. 

“Patience, yeah, yeah, yeah, how long will that take?” –Tae Kwon Leap, the Frenetics