Beginning to jell…
Oh, thank God.
I’ve finally reached the point at which the book has begin to “jell” together–as in Jell-O setting. The sudden shock of “rightness” when the thing finally pulls together in a coherent fashion instead of a thousand little tiny things zooming off in several different directions…it’s awesome. There is pretty much nothing like this feeling, unless it’s the relief of the last set of revisions sent off, or the first time an editor says, “I like it!”
I know I’ve been bitching a lot about this book, but it’s mostly because the interconnected vignettes are hard for me to write until I get that sudden jolt of rightness. It’s like the train backing up to push the couplings together*, then jolting forward, one car at a time, slowly building until the critical threshold is passed and the momentum forward starts to pull the whole thing along. So it’s a train instead of a lump of disparate metal parts. The motion has given it a new character.
Moments like this aren’t what I write for–I do it because I’ve got no choice–but they sure help.
* The Muffin told me about this. Isn’t it a great metaphor?
