Tuesday Morning Dreck

Well, I got inspired yesterday and whipped out a few pages of a new story. Now I'm about to tear it all up and start over. The story idea is solid, but the beginning I wrote out so far just isn't going to work. That's the way it goes sometimes. Now I'm going to approach the idea a little more slowly and plot out where I intend to go with it.

That's the danger of seat of your pants writing. While it usually turns out well for me, there are times characters and events simply take off in a direction that isn't going to work. And it usually takes several pages of writing before you realize you are heading into a dead end, or writing a story with a completely different tone than the one you intended. Sometimes characters want to put in an unnecessary subplot that doesn't further the story in any way. You have to give them some leeway, to see where they want to go, but there comes a time when you have to pull in the reins and yell "Woah! This ain't working!"

Then you start over.

On another note, I'm now wrestling raccoons in my kitchen. I heard something moving around in a cabinet above my stove, and thought maybe we had a mouse. I opened the cabinet...and it wasn't a mouse. There were two furry arms sticking down the crack between the stove vent and the top of the cabinet. They had grabbed the plastic bag I had put my copper cookie cutters in, and were trying to pull it through the small opening. I grabbed the bag, and the little bugger didn't want to let go. After a brief tug of war, I did get my cookie cutters back, and the furry bandit scuttled off after swearing vengeance.

Yeah, I live in a zoo. And that's not even counting the kids.