It has been quite a few days since my last post. There is a reason for it. I finished The Funhouse by Dean Koontz and I liked it. It ended pretty abruptly. I thought it was going to go on for another five or more pages...Dean Koontz tends to do that, but not on this one. It's probably because it was one of his earlier books. Anyway...now I'm working on Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child. The cover had caught my eye a month or two ago and I had read the back cover a couple of times. I've never read a thriller and I'm not quite two hundred pages into this one. It's quite good so far...I can see how you can simply keep turning pages when you read something. It also helps that most chapters are very short. Not one page or two pages short, but still short.

Now we come to the writing side. I'm up to the start of chapter 17. Chapter 16 was a sluggish mess. I've never been good with writing details and scenery and the passing of time. I can say it just the way it is...the chapter sucked and I didn't know why at first. You know it's bad when you just don't want to write because when you sit down to write you just stare at the screen...and you hear things in your head...things to write, but nothing is good or concrete. So I took a couple of days and just thought about it. Each of those days I'd write maybe a couple paragraphs or so, but that was it. I found it boring and I'm sure any reader would've found it boring. The other day, thankfully, I figured out what was wrong. The last couple pages of the chapter is me paraphrasing what's happening. It's hard to show emotions and character when you're just paraphrasing what they're doing. Do you add dialogue? What's the point? So, I deleted the last couple pages and wrote it so that instead of several days passing, only one day past. Now, it's chapter 17 time and I'm a lot happier with the previous chapter.

Writing shouldn't be hard and a person shouldn't make it hard. It should be fun and the words of dialogue and the description of scenery should just flow from a persons fingers naturally and quickly. Thankfully I can now figure out what was wrong and make it right.