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The Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, has been kicking my ass all week, but it was especially bad yesterday. I came to a grinding halt, no pages, no progress, and I didn’t know why. Usually when a book comes to this kind of halt something has gone seriously wrong with the plot, or character development. Now sometimes it’s something in your real life that’s making your muse refuse to work. I mean, your parent dies, you get divorced, near car accident, real life can make your muse hike her skirts up and run for the hills, or just shut your own creative juices down to such a small trickle that the muse has nothing to work with, but if you have no trauma in your life then don’t go all writer’s block on me, which is a failure of self-confidence and yet a different problem.

What I’m talking about is the point when a book just sits there and sulks. Now, that happens for another reason to me and that would be tour, or a long trip of any kind coming in the middle of a book. I come back to the computer and find that the book is stone, cold to me. Whatever magic or interest made me want to write the book is gone. This is a fixable problem, by the by. You can reread what you have, make small (small) edits, nothing big, because there’s nothing wrong with the book except you’ve been too long away from it. I find that often that is enough to bring the book alive again and set me writing.

But when a book that I’ve been working steadily on sits there and sulks, something else is wrong. It usually means I’ve gone down a wrong path, and somewhere behind me is the right turn. Now, if I’m lucky I notice this within a handful of pages, but if I’m not lucky, or if I’ve been particularly stubborn about admitting it then it can be a lot of pages.

I just cut 55 pages from the book. Yeah, you read that right. It’s not cut and paste it in later in the book, either. This is one of those moments when the cut pages are simply gone, trashed, useless to the book, the story, and any other books down the road. Boy, was this a wrong, freaking, turn. I can usually salvage something or put it in an outtakes file for a later book, but there is no saving it. I’ve fought with my muse for a week, and I finally have to give in and say, she’s right. It doesn’t suck. I’ve reached that scary point where not much of my writing sucks, but just because it lacks suckage doesn’t mean it’s good, or right for this book. Writing has to be good and right for the book and the characters and the world, simply not sucking is not enough. Sigh.

Someone has already tweeted that, "How could I cut 55 pages. They have trouble cutting 1." Believe me I tried not to cut it, but in the end remember it’s not holy writ, lightning did not carve these words into the mountainside. It’s just words on paper. You can write more, and you can write better.

I will blog later about the last time I had to cut even more from a book, but for now, I’ll leave it here, because blogger seems to eat my longer blogs, and that would just put the cherry on my ice cream sundae; I hate maricino cherries.