Week of the Cliffhanger
I’ve been having fun with the Apocalypse Blog this week! I knew that the meeting with the Pride would go on, but it’s really stretching out now. The posts kept reaching 1,500 words before I realised, so I’d go back and pick a good place to chop them off. And what’s a better place to end a post than a cliffhanger?
I don’t often have the chance to use them, and it makes a nice change. I didn’t want to overuse them, too – I’m not writing Alias, after all (though I love their cliffhangers – they made me burn through the DVDs at an alarming rate). But it’s been a while since things were tense in this kind of way, so I’m enjoying the chance to indulge. I have so far restrained the urge to put ‘dun-dun-DUN’ on the end of the posts, and I’ve only had one reader go ‘aaah! what’s next!’ at me (I love comments like that), so it’s all good.
I won’t string it out for much longer, though. I don’t want to overdo it and make the tension stretched thin and annoying. Today’s post should round up that awful encounter and start to bring the story back up to the present – one drawback of trying to keep the ficblog real-time is that I can’t go nuts over single encounters like this without blowing out my post lengths or skimming entire days of events. I’m trying to keep the post lengths down so they don’t get unwieldy and annoying for my readers. And I have to say – it’s not easy trying to keep track of which day you’re writing about and what has happened since the events in the post. Occasionally I squint and can feel my braincells dying under the strain.
It’s so good to get this stuff down, though. I’ve had most of it planned out for a while (meeting Bree again has been a notecard on my wall since December, complete with details of her situation), and it’s exciting to be able to flesh it out and rock it across the page. There’s so much temptation to rush towards my markers – the events that I know I want to cover – but I’m glad I haven’t. There’s so much more in there because of the space in between – I hadn’t planned for Ben to be sick during this encounter (though he was marked to get sick from the start, because I’m evil), but it worked out well. I think. And as for Sally… poor Sally. Today is her post, so I won’t talk about it yet.
Speaking of which, I need to rewrite it on the way home. I got most of it down this morning, but I need to rework it pretty heavily – sometimes my group of eight main characters feels very small, and other times they’re a lot of balls to keep in the air. Occasionally, I miss a catch.
That’s one reason – probably the main one – why I don’t like this hand-to-mouth posting. I miss the days when I had the current week’s posts all scheduled up and could work on next week’s at my leisure. While write-and-post might be Faith’s style, it’s not the way I like to work. I’m planning to spend a day doing nothing but ficblog writing this weekend, so that should be rectified soon. Fingers crossed!
I have managed to do some more admin this week too. The Cast and Chronology pages are updated, and I had a sad moment when I moved Sax from the Current Cast Members list to the Past Cast Members list. Poor zombie Sax. I wonder if he’ll turn up again.
I’m also gearing up to get going with the novel again. I’ve been having a hard time with it, but I’ll talk about that in another post. I’m going to concentrate on being happy that I am still engaged with and enjoying AB, and haven’t become bored or frustrated, even though it’ll be five months old in a few days. Each time I think about that, I am more sure that I’m going to make it all the way through to the end of the year.
I think this is enough chatter from me for now! Be well, my friends. Write happy.
KeHoeff says:
hey this is a very interesting article!
May 29th, 2009 at 8:25 am