With my recent detour, you'd probably think I'd be too out of it to do anything with respect to writing. And you'd be right. I completely lost the months of March and April. Not that I can blame that on getting sick. Based on the rate I've been moving forward on the current work, I seriously doubt I would have done anything those two months anyway. Yeah, it's that bad.

Enter chemotherapy. Six hours in a chair getting strange fluids pumped into my body? What a perfect time to print out all those notes, pour through them, and see if there's anything salvageable. Unfortunately (?) chemo only comes once every three weeks.

Catching Up

I've spent most of this year in reboot mode on the novel with the working title of Winter's Gate. Stuck on the fifth draft, I'm still severely unhappy with the pace and depth of the book. The former needs to pick up greatly and the latter needs to go way deeper. Otherwise, no one but the people I force to read it will read it. Even I can't read it.

Part of the fix has been the aforementioned note re-reading exercise. I had to make sure I didn't come up with something Brilliant back in, say, September 2010 (spoiler alert: I didn't.) The rest has been rewriting the book at the synopsis level. As I'm fond of saying: if you can't write a good story in 500 words, you can't do it in 90,000 either. And it doesn't seem to matter how fond I am of saying that, I still tend to write 90,000 words before I know what I'm actually trying to accomplish.

So that's really all I have at this point. Still hoping to get a good, solid, real draft done by 12/21/2012. After that, I'm just playing it by ear.

There exists a very special kind of frustration where you really, really want to do something and yet don't want to do it. Like, I really, really want to finish writing this book. And yet, when I at last carve out a few minutes of my week to work on it, I don't want to.

I know it's temporary. I also know it's normal. I've been through these ups and downs enough times now to get that. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating when it happens.

I made vast strides in January and the first part of February this year. Things were really looking up. I had better-developed characters, stronger backstory, powerful character motivation (where before I had next to none), everything really felt like it was at last falling together.

Then I tried to apply this to the outlines of Part I of the book: the first five chapters. It went well until I got to Chapter 3 and I found myself (once again) stuck. Stuck by the process of turning all of these new plans and ideas into a gripping story. I just can't seem to make that leap from a solid outline to a readable novel.

And that's when my motivation drops back to zero. I want to do this but then I get overwhelmed at the thought of the amount of work still ahead of me. And if that weren't enough to hold me down in the mud, that OTHER thought hits me. You know, the hard, cold fact that even if I do finish this, the odds of it ever reaching a single bookshelf are in the struck-by-lightning range.

So that's today's pep talk! Be sure to tune in again next week for another exciting installment in my highly-acclaimed motivational series: Why Do You Even Try?!

I believe the first time I encountered a map accompanying a novel was in The Hobbit. While Tolkien's writing provided wonderfully vivid descriptions of Bilbo's adventures with Gandalf and the Dwarves, there's really nothing like a map to give you an extra thousand words at no additional cost:

A map gives you a solid idea of what's going on that no amount of prose can equal. Which begs the question: is the map a crutch? Certainly a really good book wouldn't need one. After all, isn't it considered literary cheating if you have to literally draw a picture for your readers to help understand your story?

I don't think so. The lack of a map takes away nothing from the story. The addition of the map only adds to the enjoyment of the reader, offering an extra dimension of exploration for those so inclined.

The Map as a Tool

What's easy to forget though, is that the map isn't so much there for the reader's benefit as it is for the author's. When writing a story, a clear view of what's really going on (and where!) is essential for the author. Without that solid image the story might wander or become inconsistent. And what better way to create a solid image than by drawing a map.

As I slogged through the latest draft of Winter's Gate, I began to realize that a particular vagueness to my surroundings was beginning to hurt me. I decided I needed to nail down the layout once and for all.

Maps aren't just for large, sprawling continents like Middle-earth. A large percentage of Winter's Gate takes place in a single building and I simply couldn't go on without a clear vision of this building. So last week, after exploring various tools, I settled on PowerPoint (for 2D) and Google Sketchup (for 3D). I then set about realizing my world. Here are the results.

First, the building exterior:

After kicking around some ideas, it felt like a three story building with a lower level (shown here below the ground line) made sense. Prior to this exercise, I really had no idea how many levels it had. And though I'm showing you the exterior first, this didn't come about until after I'd done extensive work on the 2D floor plans:

Lower Level: where the Generator resides.

Ground Floor: clearly still a work in progress.

First Floor: not much happens here, but I designed it anyway.

Second Floor: a lot happens here (ironically I designed this last).

And the Results?

My single greatest surprise is that many story elements and scenes which I had already worked out no longer fit the new landscape. This is odd, of course. I mean, this is a novel. By definition, it's fiction. I can make whatever kind of building I want and force it to fit the story.

But as it turns out, good fiction really CAN'T be whatever I want. The reader still requires plausibility and consistency. And drawing a clear map of one of my most important settings suddenly pointed out that I had plausibility and consistency issues. It didn't matter how much I liked some of the earlier scenes. It was clear I had darlings to kill.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Rewrite

As I left the wake for my recently killed darlings, something hit me. The story was about to get better. I re-opened chapter one, with my protagonist Quin's first encounter with that orange ball you see pictured above. I began rewriting the entire scene with this new, clear picture in mind, and wow. Everything got better.

My renewed excitement from a few weeks ago was renewed once again. The story that felt dead in the water last August has had new life breathed into it twice now.

Let's just hope it isn't all for naught.

I seem to be pretty good at stories but absolutely dismal at storytelling. There's a huge difference between the two, and no good novel has just one or the other. You need a good, solid story told well to succeed. One or the other just isn't enough.

And that's been my struggle over:

• The last year
• The last three years
• The last twenty years

Lots of ideas. No idea how to present them. My drafts are nothing more than plot tent poles but without the tent. What this means to the layman is: they're boring, they're wordy, and they're nothing no reasonable reader would want to spend five minutes on.

Not exactly the recipe for success, no?

So last week I picked one manuscript, Winter's Gate, and decided it needed a reboot. I hadn't touched it for five months and of all the works in progress, this still seemed like it had the most potential.

So I spent some time this weekend trying to pick it apart, save the good stuff, throw out the bad, and figure out how to best get from Point A to Point B. But after two days, I once again was left with nothing. This is the kind of thing that will drive me back to Cheez-Its.

But then, about two hours ago, something happened. Have you ever spent days and days and days working on a puzzle but simply cannot see the solution even though you know it's right under your nose? Miraculously, that's exactly where I was. And then it hit me. Why is it the hardest puzzles can suddenly look so mind-numbingly stupid once you have the answer?

So I'm fairly fired up about this. If I don't screw this up again, I may have a shot at a decent plot. This reboot is now officially underway.

Last year I came up with the idea of the "Personal Book Writing Quarter". It's a lot like NaNoWriMo, except for three things: 1) it's personal, 2) you can write any book, not just a novel, and 3) it lasts three months instead of one.

I originally envisioned the quarter taking up October, November, and December and each of the three months covering: Planning, Writing, Revising. However, something about the calendar flipping over from August to September really sets my brain to writing again and I simply can't wait. (Besides, December is never a full month anyway, so it doesn't count toward book progress.)

So here we go again, where "we" is "I". Last year I tried to get a few people to do this with me until I realized that sorta violated the "personal" part of PerBoWriQua. That doesn't mean you can't do it either. It just means you can't tell anyone about it. Otherwise one thing leads to another and suddenly it's national again. And we can't have the entire nation all writing books during the same calendar period. That'd be crazy!

Here's a quick timeline of the latest work-in-progress:

Since subsequent drafts have yet to go beyond the first five chapters or so, I still feel like I really haven't completed a full second draft yet. And even this fourth "draft" has gone through multiple rewrites. I'll read through it one day and think, "Hey, this isn't bad." But then I'll read through it the next day and think, "This is complete crap. No one would want to read this."

And even today, just when I figured I had it all figured out and was ready to move on, it hit me again: this sucks. So I embarked on the twelfth revision of the fourth draft and I'm still only on Chapter 3.

The irony is I know what I'm supposed to do but I just can't seem to do it. I'm starting to feel that my natural writing style is more suitable for history books than gripping novels. But having invested 336 hours into this project, I'm not ready to give up yet. All I have to do is turn twenty-seven "tell" passages into "show" passages, and I'll be sitting on a pile of gold.