Stop the Bloggerea

The title of Book1 of Simon & Sally Spangenberg's Secretive Storybook Sojourn is:

Lifebringer
The Tree of Life

And I'm not telling you why...yet. Instead I want to comment on my rudest fan, Anonymous, who never fails to state the obvious to me, which is to 'just write'. Every now and then this helpful person steers my never-ending literary vehicle back onto the road of progress, by telling me to get my act in gear, stop the bloggerea (blog+diarrhea) and just write the damn book. Even Stephen King states: 'Life doesn't support art, it's the other way around'. As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I do, I always have my own brain thwarting my typing hands. 

Nancy said the other night I'm a thinker and she's a doer. And she's right, I feel most comfortable analyzing stuff and finding great connecting theories rather than putting in the grunt work. So when I blogged about having a breakthrough by analyzing the plot rather than reading and re-writing, I was in fact just tickling my own 'thinking habits'. But it is hard not too. For a body of work (= the series of 5 books) which is carefully plotted to give form to symmetry and balance to all the characters, events and concepts involved it is hard to then 'just write' it. It doesn't work that way. It would ruin the delicate storyline structure.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I refuse to start writing and see where it will take me. In fact, that's exactly what I have in mind with the second book. I want to see if I can just start typing and let the characters come to life and take me away. But for now, I cannot abandon the work I've invested in the first book. Or can I? Am I just clinging to 'my baby' afraid to make much needed drastic changes? Ah, to live a life of certainty... I wonder if that would make me a better writer or just a more self-delusional one. I don't know. Anyway, I digress.

What I'm saying is that with help of doers - Nancy and Anonymous - I am willing to change my habits with the hopes of delivering a better book. So, hard decisions and concrete actions. Maybe not all the time, but gradually and where appropriate. So hence my bold proclamation of the title of the book. In the meantime behind the curtains I'll try not to obsess about page count and perfect plot structure when adding and subtracting from the first draft. Hopefully this will produce a more balanced story. And get it done before X-mas.

Added: I am at chapter 22 (of 56?) and past the point where I have to filter through Nancy's writing and smooth out my own first-attempt style of writing. This means, with the exception of the short chapters I need to add to tell experiences from other characters POV's - to enhance page-turning excitement - I can go through chapters easier, confident that my writing style is more consistent with what I wrote before. I am deleting supporting characters and events in favor of fleshing out the main characters.