July 23rd, 24th, 25th

July 23rd.

Well, I be a back-slider.

After two days of really good, solid progress (no, not compared to YOU, Your Highness, but for me, Friday and Saturday kicked ass), I got very little writing done.  Guess I should've stayed another night at the cabin.

But in my defense, Your Honor, I was working a big chunk of the next two days, and that is kind of important, due to having a dollar sign attached to it.  Heck, I should be working right now instead of writing this.*

Just managed to jot down a paragraph or two in my notebook at lunchtime.

Words Today: 88
Total Words: 11,636

July 24th.

Another day just like the one before.  Except that, at the end of the day, I sat down and wrote a little bit, just so I didn't feel like the loser who only wrote eighty-eight words.

Which reminds me: I've been sort of revisiting a story I abandoned with a teen protagonist, and I keep struggling with how to expand it from a short story to a novel, and one of the additions I've made is to have a love interest in the story, someone who notices our guy, and because she's paying attention, sees that he has a secret nobody else can see.

Unfortunately, I already had a male character, a new best friend kind of thing, who served that purpose, and it makes me question the purpose of the love interest character.  Is she just there so that there's the potential for kissing?  Is she just there because I fear someone saying, "Why are there only male characters in this??"  Is she sort of tacked on and worthless, just because I'm not talented enough to do something with her?

Don't answer that last one.

Anyway, I was able to call Big Anklevich after work and talk to him about this quandary, and he gave me some suggestions.  Maybe there's something I can do with the love interest if I make it a quartet of teen characters instead of just a trio.

There's also a female antagonist that shows up on or about the midpoint of the story, and she sort of throws everything our main character knows into question.  I wondered, is it stronger if she's his long-lost sister, or just his cousin?**  And then I got the "brilliant" idea of, what if I combine this cousin/sister character with the love interest, and that way she's definitely got something important to do in the story?  Yay!

Of course, a lot of folks find incest slightly distasteful, them not having written a sequel to "The Calling."  And I dunno if I want to tackle that subject again . . . so soon, anyway.

Big told me not to worry about people thinking I'm repeating elements from previous stories, by asking if there's really anyone out there that's a big enough fan to have read everything I've written.  It's probably okay to have more than one story about a family with supernatural abilities, where some of them are good and some of them are evil.  Just talking through it out loud is helpful, as I have discovered when doing the Voice Recorder feature on phones and mp3 players (go ahead and look up what those were), and I think I'm in a better place having spoken to him.

So, while the conversation with Big doesn't count as writing (and neither do these blog posts), I think it might encourage me to write more tomorrow.  And the day after.

Words Today: 993
Total Words: 12,629

July 25.

I did work a little harder on this day, especially THINKING about writing the YA book.  I don't really know how to do it, but I keep coming up with scenes I want to put in the book, and I've been writing those.  That may end up being a disaster, but to me, it's kind of like I'm writing little connected short stories, and that may be what I have to do to get a novel written.

I sat up late tonight, meaning to jot down a few notes, and ended up typing quite a bit.  And those words add up.

Words Today: 1214
Total Words: 13,843

*That reminds me, there was this podcast (which shall remain nameless, but it's similar to a line in the attached sentence, which I kept trying to listen to, but had the most godawful theme song in the history of music (and I ought to put "music" in quotation marks, that theme was so unlistenable).  The content of the podcast was solid, and would have helped me, but every time I heard that theme song, I had to turn it off.  Sad.
Then one day, a friend of mine sent me an email with an episode of that podcast attached.  "You'll get a kick out of this, I bet," he wrote.  I listened to the attached episode (it was from months or years after the point I'd stopped listening to the show), and right at the beginning, the host comes on and says, "You may notice that, starting with this episode, we have a new theme tune for the podcast.  This was because of the endless complaints we would get here about it.  I personally thought the music was charming and it made me smile whenever I heard it, but due to the constant stream of angry comments, we have retired it.  Enjoy."
And I did.

**Originally she was going to be a cousin he had never heard about, but I thought, what if she's his sister, and like Luke and Leia, one was taken by one parent figure and one was taken by another?  But I don't know if that works as well as it just being the daughter of his mother's brother he didn't know existed, rather than the daughter of his mother he couldn't remember.  I still don't know.  Hmmm.