I tried. I put 110% into the effort, and I fell short once more. I’d like to blame someone, but sometimes the buck has to stop somewhere. But why did he have to pick my house?
I finished with a total of 14,904 words, well short of the 50,000 set as goal. The good news is that I added most of that to my story Mustang Sally. The bad news is that Mustang Sally is supposed to be a 15K short novella, not a novel.
The culprit is a demon I call wordiness. Even the word wordiness is, well–wordy. See my dilemma? Why use just one word when you can use six, or eight? Ten?
The first thing my very first editor taught me (I miss you Nino!) was to cut out unnecessary words. Somehow I’ve fallen into a strange time warp and am back in 1978, lush in a love affair with wordiness. The only difference is my oversize Led Zepellin LIVE T-shirt is now a moth-eaten midriff top. And I no longer write rock reviews. I hear tell the young people nowadays listen to this monotonal, repetitious chanting thing they call rap. I think perhaps it’s related to Grigorian chant, but without a melody.
I’m not sure how I entered the time warp again, and this time I’m pretty sure Rocky Horror wasn’t involved.
So, I have to ask. Have you ever been caught in a time warp, falling into an old pattern in your writing? One you thought you’d beaten long ago?
And how did you snap out of it?
In the meanwhile, I think I’ll go fix some peanut butter on apple slices and have a cuppa hot tea, and look through the hot male model photo database for inspiration. ;)