The Problem of Passivity

It's con season.

Oy vey.

Anyone who has ever gone to a big convention or worked (my case this week) a big convention knows that there is little time for anything else until the convention has run its course. In my case, this is the of-national-fame Dragon Con, which will attract almost 100,000 attendees and volunteers and guests and employees from Thursday through Monday.

I'll be in the dealer's room, selling dragon puppets to kids and kids-at-heart, which means being on my feet from about 7 am to about 10 pm. I love it, it's exhausting and mentally draining, but it's magnificent and I'm already really excited to get this show on the road.

But oh yeah....that......book thing.

*sigh*

And when I manage to make the time to write (tonight's entertainment will include sitting my butt in front of my computer screen and attempting to finish chapter 2) I'm discovering a new issue while writing in first person:

Passivity.

I'm finding that it's very, very hard to keep the book from turning into a diary. Switching between past tense, when the narrator is remembering something or telling the reader about something that happened before...and present tense, but not active (such as describing an aspect of the country or the household)...and present tense active, when the narrator is actively living what she's talking about.

Because reading this narrator's diary is not what I'm going for. I've read books like that, and they're cool; but I want this to be an active, I'm right here in the middle of everything and look what is happening kind of book.

It's taking longer to keep my brain in the right active voice than I anticipated. And it's probably going to require further editing and revisions when it's all said and done. But I've got to get the first draft all said and done before I can get the editing started, don't I?

We'll get there! When I'm not making irritated or bemused faces at my Word documents, I'm very, very excited about this book. Writing is always hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it (this is what I tell myself). It also makes me think of something I heard about childbirth one time:

If we remembered how painful it was, we'd never do it.

So hurray for short-term memory when it comes to the struggle of writing, because the pay off is worth it every single time.