Friday, November 28, 2014

Working with Old Materials

Right now I'm looking at very similar problems with both of my current novel projects -- in both cases, I'm working with old materials. I'm trying to write Holovideo from an outline I wrote in the early 1990's, an outline in which I assumed a lot of stuff that never got onto the page, but have since forgotten. And while the current text of The Steel Breeds True was written in 2001, right after the 9/11 attack, the storyline goes back even further, all the way to the second half of the 1980's. As a result, there are a lot of unexamined assumptions in that text, things that I carried over from the earliest versions of the story without really thinking about.

So while on the surface it might seem like most of my work has already been done for me, there are ways in which it's actually almost harder to work with this old material than writing afresh might be. I'm stuck on Holovideo because I reached a chapter in the outline in which there's just no there there, nothing to unpack into text. And The Steel Breeds True is turning into a real uphill struggle because of the continual fear that the whole story is rubbish and there's just no salvaging it, and if I do put it up on KDP, everybody will laugh and point.

Which means that I'm having to put a lot of emotional energy into overcoming my own doubts and keeping pushing forward. As a result, I really fell behind when I was having to deal with two back-to-back conventions and all the bookwork that comes with selling at them.

However, we're now out of convention season, and as I'm switching our sales to online mode for the winter, I'm hoping that I can get some serious forward motion happening on both fronts.

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