How Writing Changes

I wrote a contemporary inspirational romance novel a few years ago, for NaNo 2005. I promptly pushed it off to the side and proceeded on my merry way playing with fantasy novels and ideas again, but the story resurfaced about a year ago when I was chatting with my friend Jean. I snippeted her a few bits and then she read the whole thing. The first draft, scary thought. And said nice things. (Not ONLY nice things, mind, but included them).

Through that the idea of revising and shaping up this story took hold, though certainly not to the exclusion of anything else, lol. I played with it a bit at the time, but soon came to realize the problems were deeper than I'd thought at first and set it aside again.

So, the other day I printed out the whole thing and began to read through, making brief notes on every scene. Along about fifty pages in, the note for one scene was simply a large X and "delete." And for the next scene, I scrawled across the page, "Seriously?" I'd found a few really good bits (the ones I'd first shared with Jean!) but way more dross. A LOT of dross.

I sat back in my chair and thought about the characters, their kids, their issues. She's too nice, I thought. She takes monumental stuff totally in stride. Superwoman! Okay, so it's official. She needs a makeover. I began mulling over *logical* makeovers that would tweak things but not necessitate ALL new scenes!

After a few minutes, I turned my attention to the hero. Also a pretty good guy. Slightly less perfect than the heroine, but nothing that really qualifies as a character flaw. A little case of temper, perhaps, would go a long way. Or maybe...

In just over three years, my writing style has changed a lot. I've learned to characterize much better (even my stupid whiny hero from Tempest has more personal issues than these folks). And I've learned to get much deeper into point-of-view. Quite a bit I've done since then has been in first person, which helps with the deeper, but the potential markets for this romance novel want third.

Even in third, this main character thinks too much! So the first thing is to bring someone directly into that opening paragraph/scene so she can TALK about stuff instead of THINK about it. The meeting with the hero later in the scene is reasonably okay as is. She shouldn't tell him all this stuff yet. But she needs a new best friend to bounce issues off of.

I've set aside the month of February to hit this novel and bring it into line. I'd like to think I could do it all in one month--after all, I wrote the entire 52K in one November!--but I'm thinking it may take a little longer. Hopefully not a lot longer, though. Maybe six weeks? Two months tops.

I'm reworking character profiles as we speak, and I still need to mine the previous manuscript for more good stuff to carry over. It's in there. The bones are decent, and worth rebuilding from.

If you're wondering why I'm not writing either Tempest or Dottie these days, the answer simply is that I'm not. Though I've been poking at Dottie recently and getting good ideas of how things need to proceed. One thing her story does not suffer from is weak characterization. The novel is populated with true individuals and they agree on very little. Lots of fun sparks. I'm stopping short of calling Tempest dead. But she's on life support, which is sad as it is some of my strongest writing thus far. One day the answers to my questions about her will erupt in my mind and she'll hit the road running again. I hope.

2009 plans

Well, here it is the 17th day of the new year. You'd think I could post up some goals for it at some point, eh? Perhaps my first goal should be...

1. Blogging more. Aiming for at least once a week might be a good idea.
2. Getting my website completely redone and the blog integrated. Hopefully within the next month.

Most of the things in my life that I have *some* measure of control over are writing related. While many of the highlights of last year (and previous years) are in family areas, those aren't areas where public goals make sense. So here goes on writing ones:

3. Novel Submissions: Keep Majai's Fury in submission. (I've sent queries out twice already this year, and it's been rejected once. So I'm succeeding in this goal, thus far.)

4. Writing: Finish Dottie and Tempest. (It looks like Dottie is going to move forward and be the first for concentration. I'm taking her story through the How to Think Sideways course as we speak.) I'll consider doing NaNo this year, if these are complete and nothing else seems to be more pressing.

5. Contests: I plan to submit at least two entries into the Genesis. Of course I would like to increase my *streak* of finaling and increase my standing. *If* I final again this year, I'd like to try to get to conference in September. But that's not quite a goal.

6. Revising: I'm not sure what will hit the front burner on this one. It depends on how long the writing from Goal 4 takes. At the moment it's a toss-up between Quest to Be Queen and Chloe. I wish I revised faster is the real truth!

7. Critiquing: I'll take on up to four novels this year for crit, though I'm not sure right now which of my partners will have something ready. So this goal is a bit vague.

8. Forward Motion: Continue with moderator duties at FM, including writing and facilitating one new workshop this year. Other things may come up.

9. Book Tours: I'm committed still to touring at least a dozen new books on this blog this year. Maybe it's cheating to stick it in my goals when there will be two next week!

Good news and bad news

There's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that I've been pretty much stalled on Tempest for the better part of two months. The good news is that I discovered that my story had problems before I'd written 100K. I was only half way there.

I've spent the past couple of weeks going through many of the lessons in the How to Think Sideways course from Lesson 7 through 16. This time I've actually done the assignments instead of just reading them :P I also have open (and am working back and forth between) Create a Character Clinic and Create a Plot Clinic, also both by Holly Lisle.

I wish I didn't have to report that I've removed every scene from Aben's viewpoint in the draft thus far. (I moved them to an out-take file, so don't panic. They're not deleted! But I doubt there will be much in them I can re-use.) You'll notice Tempest's status bar on the right went from 47571 to 33618.

I've deleted all Aben's plot cards, completed and *future*. I found out that I'd written a character whose one redeeming feature is that he's a hard worker. He's also full of himself, afraid of heights, and a whiner. How did I not notice this months ago? I have no answer for that. I'm trying to hang onto the fact that I AM seeing it now, before I've finished the novel, before my crit partners look at him and go *huh*?

It's a bit humbling to find myself a third finished a first draft I thought I was half done. It's a bit humbling to find myself making such a simple but complex error when this is my eighth novel. But I'm trying to look on the bright side. Reading through the entire draft this week, Tempest herself is fairly strong. She has a strong voice and she certainly has conflict in every scene and she has a lot at stake in this novel. Sure there will be stuff to revise--it's not perfect--but I'm not throwing out anything but Aben's scenes at this time. I can work with Tempest as a character.

But my job for the next few days is to recreate Aben into a worthy love interest. Sure he needs a flaw or two, but he needs more positives than a good work ethic. Honestly. Where's the romance in that? :P

Progress?

If you've been hanging around for long you may have noticed that my main wip, Tempest, has been stalled for awhile. I've been wrestling with how to fix the problems I see and move forward. And in between I've been writing on Dottie and wandering Facebook and Twitter and forums and ignoring the whole mess. And I'd like to write professionally? Um. Not a good habit I've slid into.

So ignoring it doesn't work, and poking it with a stick doesn't work. What does? I've been taking Holly Lisle's 'How to Think Sideways' course for several months now. She's been covering these mired-in-the-middle novels for the last few weeks. I read the lesson and think, interesting what works for her. That would never work for me.

What DOES work for me?

Exactly. I don't know.

So why am I paying her for her experience and advice and then dismissing it? That makes a lot of sense. I haven't got anything to lose by following her plan--and everything to gain. So this week I've bought new printer ink, printed out the lessons I hadn't yet, and began studying the ones I'd only glossed over. I think the reason I wasn't paying close attention was that it looked like a lot of work. Still does. But at least now I'm applying them and working my way through her steps, starting with printing out the 143 pages of manuscript already written (about 48K). Meanwhile I'm reading through the sample novels she's included in the course, ones she turfed and started over on, trying to figure out where she went wrong, where she went right, trying to apply the insights to Tempest.

If all else fails, take a pro's advice. Working on it.

Learning to stop when stuck

You'd think a stuck person would automatically stop. It pretty much works on vehicles, doesn't it? I guess not entirely--one can spin tires and slide sideways and make a small amount of forward motion for the price of a lot of fuel.

Same can be with writing. I've been more-or-less stuck on Tempest for the past couple of weeks. I can see the rough shape of what needs doing to it to un-stick it, but the sheer amount of work has had me stalled. It's not work itself I'm afraid of. More the fact that while I'm shuffling things, I could lose parts and have a hard time putting the parts back into some kind of a whole. Pathetically, that means I seem to prefer a flawed whole over a shredded-but-possibly-closer whole. (Whole not meaning whole as in an entire novel. More like meaning the whole of what I've written so far.)

Today's lesson from the How to Think Sideways workshop by Holly Lisle is about middles that go awry and some tips on how to deal with them. How to recognize the issues and find solutions.

I'm almost glad I've stalled out and been taking the easy way of working on another project, just ignoring Tempest for the time being. You see, I want to FIX Tempest. Holly's advice (which I've seen in her other workshops) tends more to analyzing the problem, figuring out what you should have done, making notes on it, and then CARRYING ON as though you've already fixed it.

Yup.

Keep going all the way to the end, then use your notes as the beginning of your revision guide.

But I want to fix it now. Well, in theory. Really I want to already have fixed it. But I haven't.

Meanwhile I've been having a great time with Dottie, writing from one to two thousand words a day. I need to get back to Tempest, though. It's like she's standing on the side, watching, waiting. Ready to take the baton from Dottie and carry the next lap herself.

Maybe next week.

Re-re-replotting

Does this happen to anyone but me? Every single time I feel like I'm home free, that I have a solid outline and am confident that the story from here on in makes sense, I hit a wall.

Every. Single. Time.

I'm writing a structured novel, which is likely a mistake to start with. Every chapter has three scenes, two from Tempest's viewpoint, and one from Aben's. They start out the story in the same location, and will (I think!) end it there. But in between, the threads are somewhat independent.

This means that two independent story lines must both have a similar amount going on, similar amounts of tension and disasters. It's hard to keep this balanced. Today I got to the next scene of Aben's in the outline, and it's horrible. Not only that, but he's practically treading water for the next few chapters waiting for the big slide into the inevitable that signals the beginning of the end.

My first impulse is to just write him out of the story. You know, drown him or something. But it's kinda hard to have romantic fantasy without the male lead character, and besides, the story has plenty of tragedy already. I think the boy needs to live. (Probably unmaimed...though that gives an idea...)

So I pulled out Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic. She's got it laid out in three main sections: Plotting Before Writing, Plotting While Writing, and Plotting While Revising.

Clearly I need the middle one. I open it and read this:

This is the most common scenario. You're somewhere in the middle of the writing and you hit a bad plot card. It sounded like a great idea at the time, or maybe it only sounded like an iffy idea at the time but you put it in there anyway, confident that when you got to it, you'd be so into the story that you could make it work. Only now you and your Muse look at each other and go, "Uh-uh. Not gonna do it."

Yep. Holly has pretty much nailed where I'm at. I have a few glimmerings of ideas but nothing that looks concrete. In fact, my thoughts at the moment are quite will'o'wisp. When I look straight at them, there's nothing there, but if I look sideways, pretending I don't care, there is *almost* something over there.

Back to reading the plot clinic. Hopefully something will coax those will'o'wisp thoughts out where they can be scrutinized.

Multi-tasking

This is something I'm really good at in Real Life, and not so good at in writing. Why? I'm guessing because each story I work on requires a certain depth of thought immersion. It's not easy to dip in lightly and then off to something else, at least not if I want to make progress. And of course I do! Also there's the idea that each project takes so very long that if you mix two or more of them, it'll take twice as long to get anywhere.

The only time I've tried two first drafts was about four years ago when I did NaNo for the first time. I hadn't finished my previous novel when NaNo started, so I dropped everything for the new novel (to officially participate in NaNo, you need to begin and write a novel you haven't previously started). At the end of November I had two partially completed novels and then spent several months alternating between the two to finish both first drafts. It was difficult and I vowed never to do it again.

Even playing with world-building or revising one while writing on another is difficult for me. All of these areas require a real depth of focus that makes it hard to shift gears from one to the other. I've been trying to learn how to do this better, especially in the last couple of years where I've been spending so much more time revising and therefore feeling stifled without the *rush* of creating that a first draft brings.

I started writing Tempest in July, thinking that once I got rolling on it, I'd pull out one of my older novels to revise. I tend to write in the mornings (my best time), then, the idea was, spend the afternoon on revising. I haven't started a revision project, though. Instead I started taking the Thinking Sideways class and bounced some new ideas around for that, then resurrected an old partial first draft--Dottie.

And now I'm finding myself doing the unthinkable and actually enjoying it: having two first drafts on the go at once. It helps, I think, that they're quite opposite stories. Tempest is fantasy set in a harsh environment. Dottie is contemporary women's fiction and quite humorous at times. So when I find that Tempest depresses me, I can switch gears and work on something fluffier.

This has been working well for the past couple weeks. I'm making steadier progress on Tempest and plan to keep it the higher priority until the draft is done. At this rate, that should be sometime in December, but if it takes longer, so be it.

I guess this means that I'm not revising anything more until next year. Two projects is ample to keep me out of trouble!

Tempest clears 40K

Although I've got a lot on the go these days, I'm managing at least an hour on Tempest most mornings. Today I crossed the 40K milestone, and I should reach the official halfway point of my current outline later this week. The outline keeps growing, though! That's good, I believe. The two scenes I've written this week weren't in the outline even last week; they came considerably after I did the massive rebuild of the outline a couple weeks back. I was staring at the notecards--have I mentioned recently how much I love Scrivener?--and realized I hadn't shown a major mental turning point for the main character.

Duh.

Today I also broke and fixed my website while I was updating it. I needed to add Tempest to the *projects* section as well as add the Genesis finals for Majai's Fury and Off Beat (previously known as Marks of Repentance and The Girl Who Cried Squid).

And while I wandered the net looking for agents to submit Majai's Fury to, I discovered a contest at Agent Kelly Mortimer's blog. Then I needed to find something to submit--something that was not fantasy! So I got an entry off today (not mentioning the project here as the entries are to remain anonymous through some complicated method, but you've met it before!)

Tempest in a Teacup

Or in a nutshell: A breeder for the Guardian Race fights to make a young prophet's vision of them leading a reformation come true even when he is banished and she becomes the cult leader's fifth wife.

Tempest is currently at 35,000 words and moving along nicely. In an effort to think about rebuilding my website, I see that the content of it is as out of date as the design itself. So I'm working on the teaser blurb next.

Not only will the website work get done, this meshes nicely with Lesson 11's homework for Thinking Sideways!

Sailing

I thought I'd share some of the research I've done today. Yes, there are sailing ships in Tempest!

Tempest progression

The past couple of days I have been trying to wrestle Tempest's outline into some sort of form that I can actually keep writing from. I had a squooshy kind of outline that was more like water-logged at the other end, but I think I've added some fiber to it and found the story's path. Or something like it, anyway. In the previous books I've written, I rarely keep to the outline, but I need it to find the general direction and to know the ONE path the story will NOT go. Like that makes sense. :p

I think it's back to that position, now, and I'll be able to take the writing life back off hold. I needed to do this before I could work on the Thinking Sideways class novel outline...or get involved in the novel crit I just agreed to do. It'll be good to get things moving again.

Tempest ReOutlining

Based on what I'm learning in the Think Sideways class, I've stopped writing Tempest. Why, you may ask... Well, I can see that the outline needs some help, and there doesn't seem to be any point in waiting until I revise this novel to address the issues I'm starting to see. I'm about a third into the first draft, and I'd rather write the second two-thirds having applied all the principles I can.

I've started outlining the new novel (for the TS class), tentatively known as Jiya after the main character. About 14 scene summaries landed on the page in little more than an hour, and I'm beginning to see the shape of the story. But where a few weeks ago I felt like Tempest was suffering from the split attention, I've changed my mind.

The pendulum is starting to swing back to Tempest. At the moment she is in the best position to benefit from the class, though I'll keep doing the lessons on Jiya as well, at least at a basic level. The class will, in theory, be starting to write the new novel soon, but I don't want to set Tempest aside in order to do that. I may try splitting the time, but if that doesn't work, then Tempest comes first.

After all, she grabbed my mind quite firmly back in June and demanded her tale be told. And there's a fair bit of it left to tell.

Thinking Sideways--plotting

Tempest is continuing on. I'm trying hard to set aside my first work hour of the day to focus on this moving this story forward. Some days are quiet and my mind is clear(ish) and I get a thousand words. Other days I'm getting in the neighborhood of 600-700. I'm reasonably pleased with those days. Yesterday it was about 300, but I'd had a lot of interruptions: boss guys, customers, phone calls. At the end of the hour, I thought: I should keep going with this because I have so few words.

Did a bit of soul-searching on the concept of things I should do. The main reason I switched from a word count goal to a timed goal was because my time isn't always my own at work (go figure). Some days reaching a WC goal can take all day, and right now I have to divide my time, and not just with work duties. Tempest is a hard story to write; there is no comedy or fluff within its scenes. She is living a nasty life in a nasty place with little hope of relief, and things are still getting worse every time I sit down at the keyboard. (I'm about 1/3 of the way into the story.) If I spent all day every day on this novel, I'd get depressed.

Don't ask where it came from. I'm not a dark person. I don't like dark books. And this isn't dark in the sense of a horror story, but in its hopelessness. Because my life (thank God) is NOT hopeless, I have to struggle to immerse myself in her troubles in order to depict them, and it's not a pretty place. So, all in all, I'm glad I also have other things to think about, and why it's not a bad idea for me to be working on timed goals rather than word count.

Quite a bit of the rest of my time (around the work stuff, which is fairly busy this time of year) I'm spending on the Thinking Sideways classwork. (If you click the link in my previous post now, you'll notice that the brief window for signing up for the class is over for now.)

I can't begin to tell you how much my mind is being stretched with every week's lesson. It is being pushed and pulled and folded and then pulled some more--much like making taffy, perhaps. I'm so logic-oriented that it's amazing I write novels at all. I shouldn't be good at it. (And maybe I'm NOT good at it, but I enjoy it and have written seven of them to date, so there's obviously something in there calling me to the process!)

This week we're talking about plotting and I'm beginning to understand that I've blown off advice I've read prematurely. Holly Lisle talks about writing a Line-for-Scene outline, and I've always thought that I needed more information than that to remember what should go in that scene.

Today I've come to the sad realization that there is a difference between a focused sentence and the...junk...I write in my short paragraph or two. Because I've been writing AROUND the central issue, not being able to figure out ahead of time what the core purpose of the scene is. I can look at my scene and, I believe, tell you that it is important, that it moves the story forward. And I believe that I'm right! But I can't tell you WHY.

So I pulled Tempest back out. I just wrote a new scene this week, after all. It's still fresh in my mind. If I was having trouble figuring out a concise sentence for a vague idea of a scene for my yet-unfleshed-out novel, surely I could do better for the scene I had just written in a novel I know.

Or not.

This is a really really REALLY key concept. I can feel the importance of it. But catching a hold of it is like tackling a greased pig.

I may need something for my headache.

Writing Workshop--Thinking Sideways

A few weeks ago I signed up for a six-month writing workshop put on by multi-published author Holly Lisle. She's the gal who founded my writing home-on-the-web, Forward Motion, and I've been following her weblog A Pocket Full of Words for the better part of six years now.

I've watched from the sidelines as she's pitched novels, sold them, written them, revised them. I've watched the misses, too. The pitches that didn't sell, the books that were hard to write. I've seen the determination and drive that characterizes Holly and her absolute willingness to be transparent with us all. I've bought several of her writing clinics from Holly Shop, and while not every one of them has clicked with me for every project, I've learned a LOT from her in various formats over the years.

When she began brainstorming a full workshop, I was intrigued, though I wasn't sure I could afford to take it as the various price points were debated. When registration finally opened at just under $300 for the six month program ($47US payable via PayPal every month), I jumped at one of the few remaining seats. And I'm so glad I did.

How to Think Sideways has been worth every penny from the very first lesson. Holly started off by looking at the things that prevent many folks from giving their all in any circumstance, writing included. From there we began clustering, which is something I've resisted doing as I just thought my brain didn't work that way. It was hard at first, but because I loved Holly's recommendation of Scrivener so much, I decided to download the free trial of Inspiration as well. It's a mind-mapping tool that allows you to associate words in any number of ways. Not only words, but many can be swapped out for clip-art and photos, to grab ahold of the more visual part of the brain.

Using the skills we had begun to learn in clustering, our next task was to *call down lightning* in the form of three viable story ideas that we would be excited to write. If you've been reading much here, you'll know I've been struggling with this for several months. And while I don't currently have THREE solid ideas, I did come up with two pretty decent ones. The fourth week taught us how to refine those ideas into something we couldn't bear NOT to write.

(Yes, this is making focusing on Tempest a bit difficult, but I'm managing some words every week there, too!)

I'm really quite excited for the next few weeks as we take those ideas and learn how to transform them into novels. So far the experience has been better than I'd hoped for, and we haven't yet begun to touch on the core reason I, at least, signed up for the course.

The core reason? The thinking sideways part. Holly's good at convoluting and twisting the plots of her stories so that they are very hard to put down. If I can begin to learn how to do that, this course will be a total success. Right now, I'm very optimistic about the five months yet remaining.

She's currently planning on repeating this workshop, and I'd encourage anyone who wants to write tighter books to consider signing up.

Haven't been posting much

I guess there are a few reasons. One is that you all don't seem to be answering much!

Life is quite randomly busy. Home is busy because there is a hyper puppy who ALWAYS needs walking and attention, a garden that needs weeding and harvesting, a daughter and son-in-law who are considerably less demanding than the puppy!--but still there. I've been going to Aquafit Tuesday and Thursday evenings as Hanna is teaching. I enjoy it, but it does shoot the whole evening all to pieces. I've got book tours coming up and almost no time to read.

There've been stressy health issues in the extended family, my own recurring back and hip pain, a hubby working too much over time, and an electrical breaker that keeps shutting off in my kitchen.

At work there's been a transient camped out between the store and the building next door (moved on, with aid, this morning), lots to juggle in ordering and freight, and it seems to have been the week for bizarre and random questions.

Writing-wise, I'm slowly getting words on Tempest, teaching a workshop at Forward Motion, and signed up for a six-month paid class offered by author Holly Lisle called How to Think Sideways. Right now it's a challenge to think at all: frontwards, backwards, let alone sideways.

I needs a vacation. How come December is so far away?

Tempest

I'm making reasonably steady progress on Tempest, though not as rapid as I'd have liked. Still, it seems that it's better to think a bit here and there than to rewrite/rewrite/rewrite. Of course I'll probably still have to! It might be that this story just didn't have as long to percolate, so there wasn't a huge build-up of words just waiting for the starting gate to open (think the rush of the first hour of Nano!). It might be that my muse is a bit reluctant, being as this is definitely a bit darker story than anything I've written previously. Or it might be that this is just the perfect pace for this story!

I'm doing in the neighborhood of a chapter a week, and they're averaging over 4K each. So if I can just keep the wheels turning, it will get itself done in a few months. That's fine.

I'd been thinking that I'd go on another round of revisions of some of my older stuff once I got rolling with this story, but it's not happening yet. I'm teaching another workshop at Forward Motion in August, and I've recently signed up for a six-month writing course put on by author Holly Lisle, How to Think Sideways. Even after only one week, I'm beginning to see that this investment is quite likely to pay off in a practical sense.

So it'll be at least September before I start revising again, and it's a toss-up still whether it will be Joy Comes in the Morning or Off Beat. Off Beat (aka Squid) has finaled in the Genesis contest, but I won't have the results of that until mid September. I'd hoped to enter Joy in the 08 contest as well, but didn't have time to revise the opening pages to my satisfaction, so I'd like to enter it in '09. A whole new category for me: romance!

And if I'm going to get chapter five written this week, I'd better get rolling!

Good writing day

I'm not sure what kept the customers out of the store today--yes, I remembered to unlock the door AND flip the sign to Open!--but I had plenty of peace and quiet for writing in.

Tempest's story is almost to fourteen thousand words, which averages out to about a thousand a day since I started writing. That isn't a mind-boggling amount by any standards and yet it proves that slow and steady will definitely get you somewhere.

For Tempest, that many words have landed her in a heap of trouble, and it's still a looooong way to the other side.

Poor Tempest

The story is just short of 10K now, and I have broken Tempest's heart. She doesn't see how things can get any worse. But you know--80,000 words to go. It CAN get worse. I'll let her cry under the apple tree a bit longer before I show her how.

Tempest clears 5K

Tempest's story is up and running, though not without a couple of false starts. I'm still amazed I'm actually writing with only a couple weeks of worldbuilding and outlining under my belt!

I got about 700 words into the second chapter on Monday but it felt sluggish. I re-read it and couldn't see the problem. There wasn't an over-abundance of backstory or thoughts (two things that can grind a story to a halt in no time, especially in first person narrative), there was tension and the story was moving forward. In the evening I poked at the outline a bit to see what was missing. And the goal for the scene was too vague. I was in the right place, going the right direction (I think I only wound up tweaking half a dozen words), but with a blindfold on.

Tuesday I flew through the rest of that scene and well into the next one before the customers started coming. In the afternoon I basically designed flooring for a renovation and a whole house, so perhaps there is an excuse for not finishing the scene!

It's interesting--I'm not sure where this story came from. It's not a particularly happy tale. Sometimes when I'm working on a novel I can almost see the characters trying to hide from me--they don't want to go through what I've planned for them. With Tempest--definitely my darkest tale yet--it's like she's pushing me to tell it. It's like she knows she has to get through it to get to the happy ending, and just wants to push through.

So I guess I'd best get back to the writing!

Tempest begun!

I got a decent start on Tempest today: 1565 words and a complete scene. Actually I deleted the first 250 or so words and started over, deciding to introduce two other characters a bit further in. Four seemed too many for the opening scene, and left Tempest narrating instead of engaging. So now we're starting with Cadence in tears and Tempest trying to comfort her, when what she really wants to do is rail at the injustices in their lives. Trust me, Tempest's story is not going to be a ball of joy. There is a LOT of injustice in her little world. I'm actively looking for places to lighten it a bit along the way, but it's a tough story. I'm not sure why this one called to me so insistently. I'll likely find out.

Tempest's basic need is for safety and security, so I guess that tells you what isn't in her life at the beginning. But she's strong. She's a survivor. And unlike some characters who stand there wringing their hands at what the writer is planning to do to them next, Tempest is all about me bringing it on so that she can get to the other side and her happy ending.

So we've started. I'll try updating my progress in the sidebar, so keep an eye!