The Gobi Desert

About 150 pages into her last novel, The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton wrote in her diary,

What is writing a novel like?
1. The beginning: A ride through a spring wood
2. The middle: the Gobi desert
3. The end: A night with a lover
I am now in the Gobi desert.

Honey, I’m camped there with you, and I think the camel ran off.

One plus to meeting tête-a-tête with Dream Agent at RWA National is the immediate feedback on the current projects. One minus is the conversation in all its nonverbal communicative glory…the facial expressions that disabuse you of any hopeful notion you might have concocted from an email exchange or even a phone call. That, alas, was the result. Instead of WIP 1, we’re shifting to WIP 2…the one that’s stranded in the Gobi sans camel. Urk.

WIP 2, aka “the baseball book,” died the death before the end of my second go-round with NaNoWriMo. Great premise, not enough steam. Rereading said WIP during the train ride home, I realized that it suffered from several flaws: the backstory dump. The excessive navel gazing (all women’s fiction has a degree of navel gazing, but…). The trips to nowhere. The pointless scenes.

Thankfully, the idea engine is slowly cranking to life. The endless construction project next door to Daddy’s house gave me an idea for my foil character. I was able to extend a surprise metaphor and make it work better. The characters are becoming rounder and less cardboard. Okay, so I have to rewrite the whole thing. It can’t get sold if I don’t, right?

Sadly, Wharton never finished The Buccaneers–she died when she was about 3/5 of the way through. Let’s hope the same won’t be true for me.