Hal posted an awesome blog yesterday which I highly recommend checking out if you missed it. Due to some technical difficulties (meaning due to us never updating the software that runs our blog in two years of having it), she got off to a late start.

Everything Hal said was spot on and will go a long way to making that final draft more powerful. Unfortunately, it’s the exact kind of information that has tied me in knots for more than a week.

You see, I know I must vomit out this first draft. I have to spit the words onto the page, get the story out and not worry about finding the perfect words or the deepest POV. But this week, I forgot.

I think of it as getting off track. My writing train pulled into a station and took the wrong track out. How did this happen? Good question. And if I had an answer I’d write that book and make a fortune.

Deep POV is what hung me out to dry. Which is funny because it could have been a host of other things. All my action takes place in empty rooms. All my characters hang out pretty much naked. My hero is a eunuch. (That last one is a real problem and Nate (the hero in question) is NOT happy about it.)

Can you put parenthesis inside parenthesis? Is there a plural for parenthesis? Word suggests parentheses so maybe that’s right, who knows.

See how easily I’m sidetracked?

Back to the story. So I googled deep POV and found this great ten part series on everything you needed to know about the topic. Ironically, around about part nine, the author says something like “by the way, don’t try any of this in your first draft.”

Duh.

FOCUS is what I need right now and I need to focus on vomiting this story out. Since I’m the only person here who doesn’t have at least one MS under her belt (bed?), what I want to know is, does the vomiting come easier the more you write? Do you have the confidence that you can fix anything in revisions or do you get tangled up thinking you needed to do better the first time so revisions are less painful?

PS: I wonder if people would be offended if we gave out little black barf bags with the skull-n-crossbones as decoration? Wouldn’t that be a great reminder? We could sprinkle them with glitter.