Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Dio song as origin of this blog’s title.

I took an unannounced week off here, because I took a week off there, in work-land.

I had high hopes for this week. My pool game continues to improve. I really need to start blogging about that so I can nerd out to myself about it in real time.

I have a pool/writing intersection I could write about, concerning the frustration of raised expectations, with the solace being that hey – you’ve got better! The price of progress is that you expect more of yourself: in pool, in writing, in life, this lesson holds true. It is a powerful silver lining to some problems you come across as you are learning new skills or improving upon old ones. Don’t let the new expectations get you down, use them as fuel, as encouragement!

So there’s that blog written! Score!

Warning, exclamation abuse detected.

This week I ran across a different kind of problem, the one I think of as the key to the lock problem. I’ve said it before here, but for me, a book I’m writing opens up and becomes unstoppable once I turn the key on the central idea, motif, character arc, something, that suddenly makes everything else in the book work (for me as the writer). The unifying principle, the animating idea, the thrilling exploration that makes everything: story, character, theme, outcomes, all sing from the same hymn sheet.

I thought I had that for The Red Palace. I foolishly thought it was simple, obvious even. I took it for granted. I assumed I had the right shape or song in my head for this story.

I have now written three separate openers for the novel. Maybe four if you count the discarded prologue. Each has part of what I’m looking for, but not the whole. I have, belatedly, realized what a complex undertaking I took on, thinking it was a simple story with a hugely unsubtle message, so it couldn’t be that hard to construct, right?

Wrongity-wrong-wrong. Boohoo. It’s a broken glass puzzle, and I keep cutting my mental fingers on its edges, and can’t find a way to put them together elegantly. Can I make it into an art installation and call it “Clot Vase – a meditation?” Maybe.

What is the problem? Brevity. Compact expression of multiple things at once. Through dialogue. Lots of dialogue. Five different agendas, at least five different sins plus the sins that bind all together. Being aware of the need to point the reader first this way, then that, a slow reveal of different characters at different times building to crisis and resolution. And how does my inciting incident and first big hook look? Pretty anemic after I’ve cut myself half to death on competing ideas that don’t want to play together. Yet.

I am determined to find the key and turn it. I know it is there. I refuse to give up just because something is more difficult than expected. I perhaps suffered from unrealistically elevated expectations there, and have been brought down a peg or two. This is good. Reality checks can be just the tonic a writer needs. We are prone to wild delusion after all. I am anyway! I am also aware that I checked out of one project to embrace this one, and I refuse to keep jumping from one idea to another – that is pro-level procrastination, but it doesn’t pay any kind of wage, so there is no point in being professional at it!

Mild exclamation abuse noted. Breathe.

So, I’m going to keep writing ideas, character studies, opening positions and goals, end points and resolutions, bits of dialogue and interplay, and somewhere in there, as I always do, I will find a glass key among the shards, turn it, and stop cutting myself.