Process - Is It the Second Week Already?

I thought we weren't supposed to experience a serious crash until the second week. I may have been misled because I experienced it right away on the second day. Between elections, a meeting for which I was trying to prepare and getting caught up on my novel planning, I didn't write a single word yesterday. And staying focused today could prove to be a challenge. I'm hopeful though, very hopeful.

One of the reasons I'm so hopeful is that I believe I may have found a better solution to the fact that I have not yet named my protagonist. On the first day of writing, I left her in entirely pronoun land, which occurs to me now as having been a pretty dumb move on my part. It means that I'll have to evaluate every single "she" in the 1700+ words I've written so far to determine whether it should be replaced with a name once I get it figured out.

On the other hand, if I name her something totally strange, like, say, "Spunky" or borrow something off the beaten path (such as "Scout" from To Kill a Mockingbird), then I'll have a decent placeholder name that can be easily run through a 'search and replace' function later.

In more good news, I feel like I've sorted out some more of the important background things - like why in the world this young woman would really have ended up in El Paso of all places and why she would want to go back. I still have some additional research to do in terms of work there - I have some concerns that the restaurant work there might not be exactly what I would hope for her - wouldn't be compelling enough. Certainly the tips are not likely to be as good there, which is probably part of her motivation for picking up sticks and making her way back to Seattle. Okay, I feel better. Yes, there's more to figure out and I think I'll find answers I can work with.

Next post, I'll see about offering more information about this novel in the way of a synopsis or something. For now, I'm thinking it would be better to sit down and write the thing instead of spending any more time writing about it.

Daily Total - 1748
Running Total - 1748