chronicled & illustrated

It’s been a long time since I’ve set off on a writing adventure with only a tiny glimmer about where the story is going. Yesterday I wrote 468 words. It would have been 469 but I couldn’t resist rearranging an awkward sentence and that cut out a precious word.

Is there a tongue-in-cheek icon?

What happened was this: I sat at my computer most of the day, wasting a lot of time. I wanted to keep writing, but I didn’t. I satisfied myself that I’d come up with what felt like a beginning. What I wrote was a surprise. It arose out of a character that I know well; a character who is young and therefore has lots of room for evolution and change. Perhaps that’s been the most fun about writing this YA series. The characters show change almost constantly without effort on my part.

So I have a beginning. Now it gets going in earnest. It’s coming back to me from other years that I just have to tough it out. I have to sit at my computer today until I get a full day’s quota. I have to write even if it seems bad and worthless and like it’s going nowhere productive. I have to write through every doubt that comes up. I have to find my way through the beginning this week so that I have a hope of a middle.

The image is a diagram of the (obviously) fantasy world these books are set in. A world that in the first two books has the three countries literally separated by colour. At the end of the previous novel, the world is re-unified. This, the last book, deals with the ramifications of that act on the populace and on the main characters, all young adults.

I’ll check in tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under NaNoWriMo, fiction, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.