Sneak Peek

One of my characters didn’t recycle something.  It was annoying until I realized she didn’t realize it.  This kind of thing happens embarrassingly often when I’m typing out the first draft of a new book.  My handwriting is… So in my defense, I write everywhere.  I carry around my notebook whenever I expect to have some downtime.  I’ve written in the dark.  I’ve written outside on a windy day.  I’ve written left-handed (I’m not left-handed.) while trying to do something apparently far more necessary with my right.  Sometimes this causes my handwriting to suffer.

And I scribble when I’m just sitting in a comfy chair concentrating on my work.

When I’m typing up the draft, I occasionally need to pause to figure out why what I just typed didn’t make any sense.  In this book, I typed, “There was a fear and a bucket of supplies.”

Wait.  What?

And I probably didn’t mean that “Noah was an excellent distortion” either. 

I typed, “It got me a bunch of other stuff.”

That could make sense by itself.  I still had to pause because the context revealed that it should have been, “It got me thinking about a bunch of other stuff.”  Sometimes what I write is wrong even when my handwriting is readable because I skip words when my brain is moving faster than my hand.  Sometimes I have to pause before I type because it doesn’t make sense in the notebook.

That was the case for a sentence that read, “And they almost always indided some joking and random tangate.”  I had to stare at that for a moment before I saw that I’d been trying to write about something that included random tangents.  At another point in the story, I found a super deep question about reflecting on the “unpertive” of a holiday.  That’s what it looked like anyway.  I’m still reflecting on what I meant to write. 

I also wrote that someone “wanted a break this break.”  I think my brain wasn’t working faster than my hand there, it just wasn’t working.  One of my favorite puzzles so far has been where I wrote, “He was probably only there because of those other people so it made sense”

I find plenty of crossed out words in my drafts, but this was the first time I didn’t write something else in its place.  It just ended there and moved on to the next sentence.  I forgot to correct myself.  I hope what I came up with is as good as what I forgot to write three months ago.

Yes, all of these examples are actual fragments of my next book which has not yet been released.  It doesn’t even have a release date.  This is a thrilling sneak peek behind the scenes of my unfinished work.  Oops, not sure how I mistook vague and uninteresting for thrilling.  Maybe I was writing upside-down.