stuck, Stuck STUCK!

Dammit. Remember how I've been breezily chatting about how well the book is going, how it just seems to flow from heaven only knows where? Yeah. I'm stuck. It sucks. I know where I want to go; I know the next big plot twist; I know the next few fun scenes I want to write, but I don't know how to get there from where I am now. And I may have written myself into a corner, so to speak.

I don't yet know how the story will end. Do I go with the cliched happy ending? I think I have to. But there is part of me that wants to end it not happy, so that I can come back and write more about it. The book is about two primary characters, a man and a woman. These two characters are (almost) all that I think about. Even though I'm not totally sold on what I've named them. The male lead has gone through at least 3 name changes thus far and the female...I've changed her name twice now. But she's also always changing her name throughout the story, so that's completely in character. Hee.

I've been editing and editing and editing over the last few days. I've asked someone to read what I've written thus far (taking MotherMe's advice) and I want it to be in the 'best' shape that it can be before they read it.

I'm thinking about what the book says about me as a person...all the writing advice I've ever come across that I thought was worth a damn said "Write about what you know." and I thought the first time I saw that, and still think now, that is good advice and it is complete bullshit. If everyone only wrote about what they know, there would only be biographies to read. Sure, sure, you can argue that all sci-fi and fantasy springs from mythology, and you need only be well-read in the classics to construct a fantasy book, and maybe you'd be right. But if Anne McCaffrey had stuck to strictly what she KNEW, would we have her description of FTL space-flight, or the Dragonriders of Pern series for that matter? Somehow, I don't think so.

The woman's character is not really a lot like me, but that's been a conscious effort on my part. So maybe she's aspects of me that I don't like to share or that I'm unaware of. And writing the guy has been tough, although you're in her head space, not his, so you don't really know what he's thinking. Most of the time. And telling more than that would be telling more than I'm ready to, so onward.

Plus I want this posted before the calendar turns over to March 4th, so that's all for now.