I got words on TalysMana today. Well, they aren’t words IN the story. But I redid my index (plot) cards to reflect the change in direction the story took, and to make sure that I stay on track with the sense of wonder in having imagination create your own living alternate universe.
So, in spite of vertigo and feeling rough, I’m getting back on track.
How about you?
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Tuesday – another scene mostly written, previous scenes mostly caught up. Could be back on track Weds…!
Bit frustrating not to get back on track with my write-in today. One scene took a little longer than I’d hoped. However, some of my ideas are fitting in nicely. I’m about a third of the way through, I reckon, and with a good couple of days and a bonus shift on Saturday morning, I should be back on target. I want to get it sent off by the end of September, and I think once this revision is complete, I’m going to need another one to concentrate on the ‘cosmetic’ stuff, though that should be much easier. And I have a part-time job as a postie starting next week for 12 weeks, just to keep me on my toes!
1003. A scene/chapter with an argument between the protags. I’m finally over the 55K hump. FINALLY. Now if I can just get the next 40 done, it’ll all be good, LOL.
Progress was okay today, but I was distractible. Thought about doing more this evening but instead going to rest and try to have a solid, focussed day tomorrow.
Reasonable day. Thought I’d get a second wind this evening but instead got the Friday feeling. Will do some tomorrow morning though.
And… A’s or B’s on the exams. I’m good to go now.
Back to writing…
Poof! I’m back!
Yeah I went camping again. I got half a letter written to a friend, 80 words on just how badly I hate raccoons, and I wrote notes on the Junior Ranger workbook for my daughter (she got a badge!). We saw a blue butterfly that’s quite rare around here– a red-spotted purple emperor, if I remember the book right. Did a lot of other stuff that I’m going to count as research, including hiking through mud and ‘skeeters.
Thanks to everyone for ideas on how to get a few minutes alone to write in. I’ll try some of them this weekend. On the plus side, the airshow is going through Sunday, so everyone’s quiet because all you can hear is engine noise anyway.
@Jonathan: Congrats on the test scores.
not doing so well. Finding that my jungle story’s worldbuilding and character histories ended up a lot more complex and less blank-slate than I’d intended and most of that is being vomited out onto the page in lumps of infodump instead of being ‘shown’.
This may be just me brainstorming as I write, because it’s a new world and story and not my beloved ARC project so everything is in-progress.
but I’m afraid I won’t have enough time to revise before Holly starts accepting submissions for Rebel Tales. I have no idea what the time window is for that.
I’m off work, I’ve been stuck at home for a week with nothing better to do, you’d think the story would be finished by now…but instead, a combination of boredom, distractions, shitty sweaty Japanese summer weather outside, increasingly stressy preparations for my trip home for the summer (I leave the day after tomorrow) has meant slow progress at best.
I need to get out of this apartment. I’m sleeping and eating at odd times, not exercising, staring at a computer screen for most of my waking hours, and feeling like a zombie because of it. I’m glad I’m going home in a day or two and not doing THIS for a month, I’d rather be back at work!
woops. didn’t mean that last to be a reply to Danzier’s. sorry. and WB Danzier!
Thanks. Wish I were going to Australia.
And … did you take Holly’s crash revisions course? If I recall, she’d said she wants to give her editors a month to settle in, which would mean you’ve got probably 3 weeks for the story. (That’s supposed to be encouraging, not scary.)
Woo…Ok, I didn’t think of using the CRASH course, I was going to try to put it through what I have of HTRYN so far. That’s a much better idea!
Thing is, once I’m home in Australia I should be more comfortable and have lots of spare time hanging around my parents’ house resting up. Second Life won’t be distracting me because Aussieland’s Stone Age internet can’t handle it and our backwards hillbilly government banned it anyway. XD
FTR what I do on there at the moment is make life-sized, realistic dinosaur avatars that people can stomp around in. But it’s stressy because of the …uhhm…kind of…people…that seem to be buying them for …disturbing reasons…I’m getting really fed up with the whole thing.
Anyway, providing I discipline myself NOT to sit around watching Discovery Channel for a month (hey, I don’t even HAVE a TV in Japan, gimme a break!) I might be able to finish that story in Aus. YAY!
Off topic!
I don’t have a TV either. I used to. I ditched it when my then-3-year-old decided that the house was clean because a tiny Mike Rowe lived in my cupbords and cleaned it at night. There is such a thing as too much Discovery channel after all.
Back on topic–If your parents are anything like mine, you may have to resort to staying up late typing. I would love to see what you end up with.
Off Topic! I haven’t a television either.
Dad broke our last two, and it didn’t seem worth buying another.
770 today. 56,025. Up up and away.
1.9k words, but all probably throwaway. Just concept work, I suppose.
On the bright side, I think I’ll be better at creepy, inhuman characters now.
469 words, finished the rough of chapter 7. I also introduced the creepy janitor. So: three characters in the sewer; four characters in cages about to be filled with water in a disturbing effort to get them clean; one character missing; one in the hospital. I ended on a slight cliffhanger (“If they don’t shut off the water, I’ll drown!”) so I want to jump to the security guard and get his storyline rolling. He’s the one in the hospital, by the way. I just have to plan out his part a little. He was unexpected.
I’ve got to be doing something wrong. I keep having random characters show up who I don’t know and didn’t invite, who want to save the day and upstage the MCs.
Update: I just discovered what plot cards are for.
They’re so that when you figure out an awesome scene, and research it, and get everything set so you can pound out 1500 words in an hour, you also REMEMBER TO WRITE THE SCENE!!!
Yes, I forgot to write the awesome near miss scene. Chapter 8 will have to wait. *facepalm*
I am working on Bx2. I have an idea for the narration and the reason the story is being told. But I am concerned it is lame. So, I think I am going to have each character write a few paragraphs on why they should be the one to tell the story and why they should not. I also think I might also have them tell me who should narrate if they can’t, and who shouldn’t. The rivalries alone might tell the story.
Ok…
The scene I skipped is back in. It will need some fixing in the edit phase to make it mesh just right, but it’s there. 533 words. Not quite the number I was hoping for. Usually my scenes run upwards of 1200 words, but on this project I can’t seem to get half that, and I’m not sure why. I know I’ve cut my descriptions down, but I didn’t cut them THAT much…
That brings the total SP word count up to 7290 out of an estimated 60,000. And I’m hoping to finish by the end of August so I can revise (or at least fix major trauma) during the first week of September, after my daughter’s in school but before I am.
Easy as pie, right?
“Chapter 8: Fishing and Other Manly Pursuits” is done. It sort of flew by me, actually. 1643 words.
And I finally broke down and baked cookies.
*Cookies for everyone!*
COOKIE
Cookie.
Cook-ie?
On to the next chapter of the Pilgrim story; Eluk (male MC) has a surprise visit from his deity (!) while Qaya (female MC) sneaks in to see her old teacher for help with what to do about Eluk.
I need to squeeze some more romance-time into this story before it escalates. Because once the twist comes, and it is coming, it’s going to be a fast-paced rush to the end…
56,745. 720 today.
Exactly 1000 tonight, bringing the total to 10340. Yay, I broke the first 10k mark! The kidnapees aren’t going to drown quite yet, but they’re still locked in cages. I also got the 24-hour time limit set.
I wrote 286 words this morning, and I’m stepping back into my novel, The Crystal Sword, from a slightly different angle. I feel like i have some renewed hope for the project. 250 words a day minimum is probably my speed right now.
I’ve been having some bad blockage lately. I’m up to over 36,000 words, which is about half-way through. But I’m stuck on the last scene of the last chapter of Act 3 (of 6). I think it’s because I decided Act 4 will wind down the action and suspense for a bit and give the characters room to breathe, so they can deal with some of the emotional issues. Which is important to the story, and the pacing, and all that.
It’s just, I’m a thriller writer, at heart, and I guess without explosions and intensity and adrenaline, my mind wanders to nowhere. Or maybe it’s something else. I dunno. How do you guys usually solve writer’s block? (Some people say, “just force it out”, but trying that always sends me into a downward spiral of depression)
I have a background on my computer that helps. I got it from a webcomic called “El Goonish Shive”. It’s a picture of a writer’s block in an early computer game dungeon. It says, “A ‘writers block’ appears! What action [I changed this line] takest thou?” Then it has options listed (throw food at it, kick it and run, take a nap, and write a filler comic). Staring at this background and the evil face on the block makes me want to write just to spite it.
It’s strangely effective.
Heh. I read that comic for a while. Was kind of a guilty pleasure, until I realised that the whole thing was less about telling silly stories, and more about indulging the writer’s bizarre sexual fantasies… Still, it was witty.
Anyway, I think it helped just to put my problems into words. I was able to look at what I wanted to do, and what I’d done, and ask myself, “If this was somebody else, what would I say?”
And I thought about it, and decided if I could get through Act 1, where the characters are introduced, I could get through Act 4, where they’re re-introduced.
Yeah, I’ve gravitated away from the comic as well. But the background annoys me, to my benefit.
The fun thing about breathing space in a thriller is that once the audience and characters have had their break, the screaming goes to a whole new level.
506 words today. I had one important idea, which is… the kidnappers have to be permanently dealt with. From that I started looking at the story backwards, and decided I liked the company and its mission. So now there’s an embezzlement sub-plot which I wrote the first scene in today. It’s called “Business is Business, But This Is Ridiculous”. I also decided to have different types of scene/chapter titles depending on which storyline the scene belongs in. The main character gets one word headings; the secondary character gets “In Which…” and other scenes have descriptive titles like the one above.
MANUSCRIPT PRINTED.
HTRYN PROCEEDING.
VICTOLY WITHIN EVIL CLUTCHES.
M.W. AH. AH. AH.
WandersNowhere-
I’ve been in HTRYN for over a week now and I’m still on Lesson 1. It is pretty brutal but I can’t wait to see what the outcome for all of this is. I love it when I have to stop and process the fact that I’m learning things I never even considered before. It’s the most amazing feeling ever. I just wish I could get past this lesson a little faster!
I have a story in the planning stages as well to keep me busy when things get slow with HTRYN. LOL, yeah…don’t think that will be the problem. This new story is coming together nicely. That sure wasn’t true for the first one. I’m on the scene cards section now, and have a hand full of scenes I’m anxious to write. Just need to figure out the middle.
Which brings me to my question: What part of writing your book tends to be the hardest? For me, although the middle comes out a little murky…writing endings have been horrible. I can’t write an interesting ending in a first draft. It always comes out way different than I intended, and not in a good way mind you.
Onward with Lesson 1!
Hi Tori,
I tried to write this yesterday but my mum’s internet loves to die at random. I’m in Australia at my folks’ house.
So far I feel like I must be doing something wrong (or maybe I’m just horribly arrogant
) because I’m finding a lot less wrong with my book than I am finding right. So far nothing feels broken, just a few minor tweaks where I’m looking at it and going hmmm I could do that a little better. And a lot of it is making me chortle with glee instead.
That said I’m only at the start. This novel was supposed to be the first of a trilogy i had already pre-mapped with the screenplays I wrote back when I was interested in being a filmmaker.
Except I got to the tournament scene, and realised I could use a more compelling reason for the King to want to meet the heroes.
Then something Happened. The drippy damsel in distress I was trying to pass off as one of the MCs suddenly decided to grow a (demented) personality, leap aboard the plot and steer it off in her own direction. The main villain, who was intended to have an unexpected relationship with her, decided to start it right there and then by appearing two countries away from where he was supposed to be in order to flirt with her and sow the seeds of …stuff.
And the actual tournament games I had originally scripted as a throwaway montage became a huge dramatic deal which pretty much defined the relationships of the three MCs to each other and knocked the main romance back an angsty peg.
Because of all of that was pure unplanned first draft I’m expecting to find a lot more holes there.
Hey WandersNowhere!
You know, you could just be one of those lucky writers that actually doesn’t have much you need to change in your book. That does happen you know.
That being said…how many novels have you written? If this isn’t your first that might be a big reason right there you aren’t finding much wrong with your book. The more we write the better we get. At least I like to think so. For me I have found much I need to change! Not only is this my first completed novel…but I wrote it for Nano. So…I sort of expected this to be hard work. Don’t worry if you don’t find your mistakes right away. It will come to you!
I have to admit I’d much rather feel like you! This has been REALLY hard for me! But I’m excited at how this will all turn out.
Sounds like you had a Eureka Moment Wanders! Glad to hear you found the place where you can strengthen things and really make it mean something! I’ve had some of them myself! And you know what? This is only the beginning!
For me…well, I found places where I really don’t care what is happening. I thought it was great when I wrote it, but now I hate it. So there are quite a few scenes I already know need a complete rewrite. Others I am quite happy with. One of the biggest changes for me is my MC herself. She acts freaking Bi-polar or something. I need to find out what I need her to be and keep her that way. At the moment she is all over the place!
I corrected 18 pages last night. I’m about halfway through on Lesson 1 now. Just a little longer and I can get to the next lesson!
Wanders: *madly rubs hands together and tries to peer over your shoulder*
SP Update: Next chapter done with a happy dance!
So… it was about 500 words (par for the course). I’d “ended” with the main character having no options, very bummed, not sure how he was going to rescue his friends. It felt wrong. I wanted a cliffhanger and I hadn’t written one. So instead of rewriting, I stuck the hero with my frustration at the story, and lo and behold, he had a minor existential crisis, got up, opened the door, and now is unconcious under water and did he or did he not get washed down the sewer??
Final count for the chapter: 1971 words, 1 cliffhanger, and I think this is the first planned scene I know I’ve nailed. Plus, I beat my self-imposed word count.
Good job
Up to reading the achievements of you guys I’d written a puny 140 words or so.
However.
I now intend to stay up until two (it’s 12:45) and see if I can’t quadruple that.
Thank yas!
Okay. Managed about 423 decent words to add to the previous 140. That’s… 563.
1. Well done!
2. Holly set the goal as one option of three, and it seems to be edging into the self-paced area. I started with “any day Holly writes, I write, and I aim for 250 words.” Then I realized I’m very wordy. If I can’t think of the right word, I put nineteen others so that when I revise I’ll think of the right one. Now I aim for 500 words…the higher my word count, the more likely I am to need revision work.
With regards to the ‘finding more right than wrong’ thing: does anyone else find their writing comes out totally black and white? As in, parts you read that make you groan, and other parts that put a self-congratulatory smirk on your face, and no middle ground?
My first drafts are always 50:50 between pearls of brilliance and utter crap. It makes sense though, because half of the time I feel like I could write better than 95% of the professionals out there, and the other half of the time I feel like a talentless hack who’s wasting everyone’s time. Guess it’s just a quirk of my apparently bi-polarised nature.
No, it happens to me too. Worse if it’s a first-first draft, or if it’s something I’ve been gnawing at for a long time and not making swift progress on.
I think it happens to everybody at some point. But if you have faith in your worth you can always keep going with it. Time is also a factor
Time lets you see much more clearly which parts of your book are inspired genius and which parts are cringeworthy.
Fear not, my first first draft had the heroes flying and zapping bad guys with magical energy beams at the end…and the line ‘I have darker fish to fry! VWAHAHAHAHAHA!’ – it can’t get much worse than that.
I’ve got that beat. One of my chapters opens with the word ‘thump’ repeated 21 times, to simulate my main character’s heart gradually beating back to life.
thump… thump… …thump…thump… …thump… thump
thump-thump… … thump-thump… … thump-thump
thump-thump… thump-thump… thump-thump
thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump
thump-thump-thump-thump-thump
thump-thump-thump-thump
thump-thump-thump
thump-thump
thump
Life is filtering back into him! How avant garde!
Ugh.
That was actually supposed to be centralised, so it looks more triangular, hence the lame ‘filter’ metaphor.
That actually leads into another question: how do people feel about onomatopoeic sound effects? (Such as putting ‘shhhlink!’ instead of ‘the sword slid into his stomach with a sickening sound’)
The alliteration is nice, but I kind of preferred the way that one sound sums it all up. Although is that cheesy? I’m not writing a comic book, after all.
I like being able to “hear” the story as I’m reading. I try to combine both tactics and have noises where they’d have the most dramatic effect. For example: “Suddenly, the bolt snapped. There was a loud PAING-SPLOOSH. The door burst open. The force of the suddenly-free water slammed the door into [MC], knocking him backwards into the wall.” (From SP) When MC wakes up he’s going to be half-drowned, cuncussed, and temporarily deaf in one ear.
And my entry for the Bad Line contest: “Isaac Isaacs is dressed in tan, with a cap with scrambled eggs on the bill (that’s the gold feathery things on a captain’s hat, not a breakfast dish.)” I wrote that in the stage directions for a school play. That same work also had the phrase “sudden sea-sodden squalls”… but I still managed to pull off a decent grade on it.
I was thinking of entering something for the Bad Line contest, but discovered that everything I’d had doubts about was either part of a paragraph-long sentence, and on the whole wasn’t horrible – or it was an underlying idea or character problem, and wouldn’t translate well.
So either I’m too critical of myself, or not critical enough but still a bad writer, or some strange mixture?
I swear I’ve written worse than that, though. I’ll find it.
Found something.
“wind works in mysterious ways.”
…
Whew. I’ve been going through my book and I’m on about page 328…I’ve filled out about one page of each of the 1B worksheets.
I feel like I really should be filling out more and reading less, but I keep getting lost in it.
A lot more sheets though, especially considering how many mistakes Holly picked out of her demo story. I don’t think it’s the story itself that’s buggy. It works as a story, but I’m not sure if enough of the story i wanted to tell is there
There’s no real indication of a resolution to the overarching plot, or even -what that actually is-. I may throw in a couple of dream-encounters or even a pseudo-confrontation with the archvillain at the end, if I can get him into the story without him blowing up any continents I may need later
On a side note, I’ve always loathed dream sequences and/or visions. They always felt like a cheap way to further the plot, and I could never relate to them, because my dreams never really make any sense, and I forget about them almost immediately anyway. I guess if magic or psychics are involved, it’s different, though.
That’s why I was never a big fan of high fantasy: writers have all these easy ways out. And even if they try extra hard to concoct ingenious mysteries and complex plot twists (i.e. they don’t take the easy route), the readers will always assume it’s just some sort of magic spell at work. The only way around it is if you set out strict rules for how magic works. But then it isn’t really high fantasy, is it?
Anyway, that’s not directed at you. Just thinking out loud.
Nah, I’ll agree with you on all of that except one point – High fantasy absolutely, absolutely has to have strictly defined rules for its magic. Otherwise it becomes that cheap deus-ex-magica fix-it-all we’re not so fond of. Sci fi can do this with technobabble too (‘Captain, if we use the transwarp phlebotinum drive to approximate a multi-phasic axis rift we could use the quasi-temporal submatter particles to create a repulsor field in the quantum singularity!’ ‘Brilliant, that just might work!’) and both are pretty groanworthy.
Actually my story is very low-magic; magic is (as in the real world) something that is governed largely by belief and superstition and, though most of my cultures believe it exists, it isn’t in-your-face…with the exception of the villains, who are inherently supernatural…and the heroes, whose powers I am wrestling with defining.
But the dream-sequences in my story exist for a specific purpose – the main character’s dreams are actually his father’s fragmented memories. The dream-scape is also where our heroes are hunted by the villains every single time they use their powers; it’s like sending up a flare. It’s also where the arch-villain would be contacting them – because he’s entombed inside a moon and not due to come back for three books yet…
It probably works much better when it’s a shared dreamscape. That actually sounds like a pretty cool idea (sort of like that Inception movie, dare I say it). Much more involving than the usual fantasy trope of the ‘chosen one’ having dreams, hinting at his ‘true destiny’ towards which he is inevitably hurtling.
I guess my definition of high fantasy is a little off, then. I assumed the limits of magic were always left vague to instil a sense of wonder, that anything could happen. Which I figured some people enjoyed. But I always felt it killed suspense, since if something unexpected happens, you can just assume a wizard did it.
I love the Chosen One idea…
…because it’s so easily subverted.
A lot of fantasy likes to have the Chosen One(s) be dictated his/her destiny by the Mysterious Mentor, and then makes two assumptions:
A) Whatever Prophecy or other dictated said destiny is Enforced By The Gods / Fate / Whatever And Therefore Completely And Wholly Accurate.
B) The Chosen One is going to stick to said Destiny and not mess it up in any way shape or form.
That sucks all the fun out of it and makes for a helluva boring story. What I like to ask is…
A) Who wrote that creaky old Prophecy, and when, and why, and what was their agenda? And just how accurate is it? has it been distorted over time? are its words as twisty and ambiguous as old Nostradamus himself? If it HAS been altered, by whom, and what was THEIR agenda?
B) If it’s not a prophecy, but a mysterious mentor telling the heroes they have to find the stone of whatsit and the magic sword of thingamajig, how accurate is THEIR information and what is THEIR agenda? Are they perhaps not telling the heroes everything…?
C) What happens if the heroes say sod you prophecy, I’m not playing this game? Can the gods / fates stop them and force them back to the Predetermined Path…? ….What happens if they can’t?
Playing around with those can make a VERY fun story. Without too many spoilers, my heroes get sold, early on, that they’re the Destined Chosen Ones because they have special powers and all the various factions are playing tug of war with them.
…but only two characters know the full truth, and nobody is telling it.
Except the archvillain, when he says – ‘Once they know what you are…everyone will use you.’
300 words today on Bx2 and two pages full of diagrams and notes. I started a new writing time and hope it will work in the short run and long run.
520 words and the disheartening realization that I have only the most hazy of ideas what I’m about as far as storyline goes.
So far – that’s 25k, folks – I’ve been writing with nothing but a vague over-arching storyline.
Now I want all these sub-plots, but I don’t know how they tie together.
Partly why I’m writing it – to see how it ends…
and maybe that’s a bad thing.
It’s not.
At least I don’t think so. I started a story once with only the thought “I want a character named Chris.” I wrote it to see what happened. It’s now the big story I want to get right.
Cool.
I’ve been working on it – revision.
Not sure how much I’ve actually written.
And not much progress on storyline.
500 words today.
About 1,200 words
and. . . . .
An Ending!!!!
A Finished First Draft!
My first ever actual finished draft of a novel! I know I have to revise it. . . And it’s a mess. . . but right now I’m just enjoying the happy glow of finishing something!!
I am emerald green with envy right now.
It’s taken me like, the whole Summer just to write a couple thousand words. I don’t think I’ll ever finish this damn thing.
Congratulations!! I’m SO happy for you!
Excellent! Way to go!
Finishing is AWESOME !! (Almost as fun as starting something new
)
Huge congrats !
WOW.
Today I’m recovering from a power outage that lasted most of last week. I got a few words in on SP, but not many, and I was too distracted to write well. So I plugged the thing into my favorite procrastination toy (Dramatica) and figured out my ending. The whole thing feels way too simple.
Holly now has her courses for those of us without paypal accounts!
800 words on Bx2.
What’s Bx2?
Bx2 is my working title. My central idea is a screen play that will be called something like “Signed, Bx” or “I Hate Dante.” This is the second idea that came from that so I call it Bx2, and the intention is a novella or novel.
Hmm, so what’s the significance of ‘Bx’? Sounds like a new periodic element.
It started out as a way a character in Bx1 signed her name in texts, emails, hand written notes, etc. Mostly out of brevity then it becomes a symbol of her identity issues.
So, Bx has become my cryptic working title for both pieces, Bx1 and Bx2.
I like that it sounds like an element in the periodic tables. Thanks.
Cool. Always fascinated by how authors title things.
Mine tend to be horrible puns and stuff that make me shudder thirty seconds after I write them.
No words to count this morning. Some writing, but i won’t count it.
About 800 words today and many more to go on this scene and character. I am writing in long hand, for now it is working. I hope to switch to computer soon. Not sure it will go any faster but it will certainly be easier to read.
Trying to gather funds for HTRYN.
In the mean time, notecarding another project.
No need to sit idle right?
An update: the write-in of my revision is at scene 38 out of 56. But I realise that 56/56 will not be the end. Some bits have fallen out during the revision and will need to find a home elsewhere as they are important. So there’ll be a rehousing revision next – prob only a day or so – then a cosmetic-read-through-and-apply-eye-liner-and-lip-gloss revision (maybe a week or two).
Then I’m sending it off.
No new words today. I got up too late to write. That is my new behavior. I get up, make coffee, feed the cat out and start writing. Shower, breakfast, email — all the other house and getting ready to work stuff has to wait until after writing is done.
Forgot to check the word count the past few days; not much but it’s an important part where I’d left it weak in the plot cards. I’m going to have to do some drawing/mapmaking pretty quick. It’s back to school season again, and I hadn’t counted on losing so much of my time to registration and new shoes.
But SP is still moving forward. 14067 total words.
250 today, give or take a few prepositional phrases. Not sure I liked the words today, but I did it anyway.
1104 Words today on the new project.
Leaving my MC trying to keep a lid on an extreme attack of Vampiric Thirst, while two other characters argue over whether they should kill her or not. Devan, being the conflicted thing she is, doesn’t know which side of the argument she belongs on.
And yes, I understand that a lot of people are sick of the vampire thing, but Devan has been haunting me for some years now, and her story deserves to be told.
Took a writing break over the weekend. Wrote aroudn 250 words this morning.
Been off-grid in the Outback, battling mosquito airforces, locust swarms, suicidal kangaroos and tinned food (yick). May join the dinosaur dig out West next year if I’m in the right country..looks like they’re sitting on a dino motherload!
Writing news, I wasn’t able to take my laptop with me (no electricity for the charger) so instead I took my copies of Holly’s Hawkspar and Talyn that finally came in at my local bookstore, and George R.R Martin’s Game of Thrones (that I was incredibly overdue in reading) and read whenever I wasn’t watching the landscape and wildlife.
My revision of ARC-1 is going well. I’m only on week 2 but I am already realising that my story could really use a killable Book I villain, to make the climax more climactic without doing in any of the big bads I will need later in the series.
Slowly but surely, a new character is congealing in my head, and a way to weave him into the story and make him work, and work hard, for my
….cause.
Adding a fun random badguy encounter just ’cause. About 700 words.
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