Nomad Chronicle

Over the weekend I indeed managed to get some baking done and took a break from The Book™. Today around mid-afternoon I felt like I hadn’t done anything and it was now Tuesday but looking back on my accomplishments I managed four chapters in two days. So I am making a dent! I’m determined to make 50% at least by Thursday.

I’m lately having the problem in changing my weak, overused words into something stronger that I’m totally stumped to come up with something stronger that either One: doesn’t sound totally dry and academic or Two: doesn’t completely alter the meaning of the sentence. In one chapter I chose to leave in a scattering of a few overused words in Keira’s dialogue while I took them out of Seik’s. My reasoning for this Keira is supposed to sound young and teenagerly and now Seik has graduated to speaking like an extremely precise and formal German. As for the other cast members I find myself at a crossroads of yanking the ‘like’, ‘know’, ‘about’, etc. out of their dialogue or leaving it in for a more natural sounding conversation and instead yanking it out of the exposition. I’m pretty determined to eliminate ‘as’ from the entire story. You’d be surprised just by simply deleting it the sentence still makes sense and sounds better.

In lieu of ‘as’ I’ve been replacing it with the trio of words ‘then’, ‘while’, or ‘and’… I’m kind of wondering if you can never have too much ‘and’ but you can have far too much ‘as’. I’m nervous about it but I’m trusting the process.

I’ve finally gotten in my head if a scene is in one character’s point of view to keep track of their physical actions because if the character turns away how can he or she know when the other character is making a face or doing an action if they can’t see it? John and Ryan had one such exchange where I was absolutely in love with Ryan’s confrontational actions and snooty expressions but John was avoiding looking at him at all. So all that remained was Ryan’s dialogue and tone of voice as well as John’s dialogue and actions. It so changed a lot about the scene action wise but it was about the information being exchanged and definitely came across cleaner. I finally feel all my reading up on the subject of writing is finally paying off in practice. I feel like I actually know what I’m doing and might have a shot at this… Once I get through the mountain of rejection letters.

As for the title of this post is something of hilarious irony. You know as a writer the romance is totally gone with your book when you get to editing the super passionate, emotionally charged, steamy sex scene… And you start falling asleep. ……………oops.

To be fair I had that scene in particular put to paper at least two years ago and had been pretty much reworking it over time as the context changed. Now it doesn’t even remotely resemble the scene it used to be save with the setting and where the body parts go. I know the thing backwards, forwards, frontways, sideways, up, down, and all around. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read it, tweaked it, reread it, put it away, dug it out again to pick off the usable parts.

Needless to say I’ve gotten pretty clinical in my head over the thing. Insert Tab into Slot B and wiggle till moist. I even worked it again to be even more emotionally charged and I was just propping my eyelids open with toothpicks.

I feel like the smut producer that totally sits on the sidelines writing his grocery list while his stars are getting hot and heavy. So desensitized to the whole thing. Or just that scene in question I think. I hope readers will still find it as OHEMGEE HEEHEE inducing as intended. I hope.