Process - Write-In

I'm off now to the local library to meet up with another NaNo to write for a while. Hopefully that will help catch me up a bit more on my wordcount again. Taking time off yesterday to look after a miserable small person who had to have a bunch of teeth extracted resulted in a bit of a hit...

Process - Take It In Context

I finished up what I hope will be the last explicit scene in this novel. I had not ever really intended there to be any such thing at all but when it came right down to telling the story, it seemed more effective to go ahead with it.

The last one was the toughest because it sets the protagonist up for a serious fall and I wanted it to be at least somewhat plausible. It's okay for her to look a little stupid (she ends up feeling that way herself) but anything more than that erodes at any sympathy we might have for her as readers. Finding that balance took a fair amount of effort which will require additional effort later if I ever try to do anything with what I've written besides put it on a shelf somewhere. And therein may be the silver lining for writing something that's probably so bad it'll never be seen anywhere else.

In any case, so now I have a fair amount of writing that looks like I'm trying to be a romance novelist/soft port queen at this point and I'm finding myself somewhat embarrassed about that and a bit uncertain about what to do about it. The conclusion that I've come to is that perhaps the best thing to do is to wait to show any of those parts until I have more of the rest of it done so that they can be viewed in context with the overall story. It does mean more of a delay before I post any of what I've written (I did locate the diskette drive so have a reliable method of file transfer available to me now) but I think that's fair under the circumstances.


Daily Total - ~ 1,500
Running Total - ~ 12,963
Average WPD - 1,440

Process - Catching Up

I didn't get a whole lot written yesterday. It was my son's last soccer game, so we had the requisite party afterward and then came home with little more than enough time to get cleaned up for dinner out with friends. By the time we returned, I didn't feel much like writing then either, and instead, decided that going to bed seemed like the best idea.

I got a fair amount of writing done this morning and then repaired to the couch to get caught back up on listing out scenes on a rindex of notecards. I followed Holly Lisle's approach, only instead of splitting scenes up between different characters' points of view, I split them up according to location since the bulk of the storyline takes place in either Seattle or El Paso. I discovered afterward that having more done made it much easier to write; I just chose the one that spoke to me most and went for it.

I must have spent a fair amount of time writing, too, because when I did a word count afterward, it was about 4500 words. Wow. Time flies...

I will say that there seem to be some occupational hazards to writing scenes of a more explicit nature, especially when I hadn't necessarily anticipated that they would go quite as far as they did. I guess I have a better imagination than I'd realized. It will be interesting to see exactly where this thing goes.

Daily Total - 4,501
Running Total - 10,263
Average WPD - 1,466