Before I fell asleep last night, I was thinking about how much the same love scenes and action scenes are.
I was working on the action scene at the end of TACV and it's just incredibly slow going through those things for me. Same for the love scenes, whether they're consummated or not. I finally figured out why this is. It's because there's so much to keep track of. Both sex and fights require me to keep track of body parts--what's where. I also have to explore the emotion of both scenes for the POV character. There are actions and reactions, dialogue, other assorted sounds and just layers of stuff.
Probably it would go faster if I would write in layers. Maybe get the body part stuff down first, then do dialogue, then emotion or whatever, but that doesn't seem to be how I like to do it. Which means really slow going as I try to incorporate all this stuff at the same time.
I was never really sure how I did at any of this. Was I okay, good, bad? No one had ever commented one way or the other. I figured if no one was ripping it or praising it, that I was doing an adequate job. Adequate. Sigh. I think that's why I enjoyed reading the BookList review of Power of Two so much. The reviewer liked how I handled both types of scenes and actually commented on them. I can't even say what a huge boost it was to be considered better than adequate at writing love scenes and action scenes. Maybe those hours and hours spent agonizing over every paragraph, every sentence, every word weren't wasted after all.
Anyway, it helped to remember this after slogging my way through revisions. I still have a lot of work to do to the action scene and I'm really not looking forward to it, but I'm not dreading it the way I was before I thought about this either.
The BookList review for TPOT is up on Amazon. To read it, Click Here.
In a completely separate topic, Nightline did a show last night about blogging. I really feel inadequate now. Here are bloggers who are watching government and the media, keeping them honest, affecting change. I'm nowhere near that league. Not that I necessarily want to be a watchdog, I truly don't have time for it, but still. They interviewed one woman who before this huge deal she was involved in erupted, said she only received a couple hundred hits to her web a day. I was like WHOA! Only a couple of hundred? I know I don't have near that many visitors. Of course, I'm not a government watchdog either.
To read the article from ABC News about bloggers, Click Here.
MN Weather Report: 18 Degrees. Wind Chill: 10 Degrees.
