writing in the dark

Writing in the dark has made my inner teenager happy. I used to stay up till all hours of the night painting, and now at 24 staying up to write my novels has become something of great joy. It’s pretty easy to get the dark part now that it’s the winter months, but even before that it was something I was finding happy. 

Each writing project is so surprisingly wildly different. For example, my first novel I almost exclusively wrote in the afternoons. Sometimes I’d start early, or others I’d run into the evening when I was on a roll. But almost the entire book was written in the afternoon hours. This second one I’m writing however I don’t seem to start till the afternoon and almost always run into the night. If in fact I don’t not start at 9 o’clock at night. Yes I did that this past week and wrote till 1 am. Not the best move but it got the job done. 

I like to set up a fake fireplace on my tv and let that run in the background while I type away. It don’t feel as cozy if the sun is still up somehow. Every project is different, every book, I’ll not be surprised if next book I’m only writing in the mornings. Who’s knows. There’s an infinite number of ways to do it right, and only one to do it wrong. Which is to say the only way to be wrong is not to write it at all. 

Keep seeing moments to come back to and edit as I’m writing, which definitely did not happen the first time around. It’s not that what I’m writing now I see as poor, it’s just I can already see where some places as I write them will need smoothing out or word adjustments. I know there are a few words I use too much, but there’s only so many ways to say someone looked at something or someone. Oh the joys of marching steadily towards a 100,000 word mark. 

Yes you read that right, I’ll likely surpass 100,000 words before I finish out this first draft. An absolutely astronomical number I never thought I’d see in one book, but here I am. I keep cringing thinking it’s going to be too long and the jury is still out. My mom thinks it’s way too long and my dad only thinks it might be. But all I can do it shrug, I’ve no idea what I am doing but it all feels incredibly necessary so I just keep on typing. 

I know on the front end I’ll have a number of redundant things that I can cut knowing I explain them better further along in the book. However I’ll leave them in for now so future me has something to do. 

I remains flabbergasted about how different two things can be when they both came out my head.   I guess I shouldn’t seeing that it’s been happening for over a decade now as a painter. Somehow that didn’t shock me as much. Go figure. The process being exceedingly different is what really floors me. But I guess not all change is bad.