531 words tonight, a few more earlier in the week.
Jace has now met Quin, the butler.
Butlers in space. Who’d'a thunk?
Anyway. There was writing, I got words, and if I seem to me to be drifting a bit off track, I am acknowledging that this is first draft, and first draft always sucks to some degree.
I will joyfully embrace the revision when Help Wanted is done.
How are your words coming?
I knew Jace Winter would be meeting Kih Soh Hohito in this section. What I did not know was that a new character, Quin, would appear.
Yet his arrival makes perfect sense. I don’t know him yet. I have an idea of what he’ll have to do in this story and the ones to follow, but I don’t yet know who he needs to be.
Again, in first draft this feels way too expository. But it IS first draft, and I’ll do a brutal once-over before I submit it.
527 words tonight. How about you?
I’ve been working on Help Wanted on and off as I’ve had the energy. Last time I updated the WIP bar, I had 6013 words total in the story. I now have 7654, so that’s 1641 since I last posted. Not 500 a day by any means, but still something.
Today I got to figure out what is cool enough about humans that we’re sought out for … well, something that would be a spoiler if I explained it. So I won’t. But I like what I got. Chapter 3 is done. Three more to go.
How are you doing with your words?
My heroine has been going through hell in hopes of achieving a tremendous goal, only to have everything she worked for ripped away from her because she chose integrity over compromise. 754 words tonight. Story, Help Wanted.
Headache is pretty bad right now, but I finished out scene two with a nice cliffhanger.
How are your words coming?
I’ve had to take a bunch of days off, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
However, when I’ve been up to it, I’ve been working. On Rebel Tales, on NovelWritingSchool.com, and also on fiction.
I was doing pretty well with TalysMana, but my daughter has some scheduling problems right now, so we’re having to put that on hold until she gets her schedule worked out.
Meanwhile, I’m putting together some shortish serial fiction for Rebel Tales. The current piece is Help Wanted, introducing a new heroine in a new SF world. I also want to write some Cadence Drake shorts for Rebel Tales. And I’m considering what I could do in the way of Tonk short stories for Rebel Tales Fantasy–probably not Talyn, probably not Hawkspar.
You can watch the progress on the progress bars to the right.
ADDED LATER: Got 581 words on Help Wanted tonight.
First, a note. The Write A Book With Me entries are going to be going to the TalysMana weblog after this entry. If you’re playing or following Write A Book With Me, be sure to bookmark the TalysMana weblog now.
Pocket Full Of Words will be going back to the essays, commentary on writing, and other things that I previously had here which have been neglected lately.
For tonight, though…
Tonight, Kettan discovered exactly what went wrong in Rengarde. Her actions in the What Is had consequences she didn’t predict…but she hasn’t yet discovered why. That’s tomorrow.
Got 843 words.
If you’re playing, how are your words coming?
Since ecto ate my post TWICE now, I’m going to keep this short.
Got a spiffy cliffhanger for TalysMana tonight, wrapped the scene, posted it, and some folks may even receive it yet tonight. Most of you who are up to date will get the latest installment on Friday. For everyone else, it’ll be along in due time.
Will Grey (now playing the part previously played by Bill Hawthorne) is paying off for me. He came through for me tonight, he’s showing me more of who he is, and I like him.
And Kettan made me laugh.
I got some subtle tension into the scene, too. That’s where I’ll be picking up when I start in tomorrow night…with the little thing that went wrong.
If you’re playing WABWM, I hope your story is coming along for you.
I focused on character development in TalysMana tonight, since I was actually giving Will Grey his first real time onstage.
Kettan ended up with a few good moments, too. I’m still not to the big bang for the scene, when Will finds out what Kettan’s been up to.
But he’s going to be smart getting there…and that part of the scene, which I’ll hit tomorrow night, will be a lot of fun.
It’s important to keep asking yourself, “Why would he do that?” about any character while you’re writing him. Your characters with make a lot more sense to the reader and your story if you keep that one question in mind every time you get ready to have a character do something. Saved Kettan from a moment of deep stupitude by asking that just before she was ready to answer a question Will asked her.
For tonight, I got 517 words I like. I’ll take that.
Am a couple thousand words now into Lesson 13 of How To Revise Your Novel. Am dealing with all the issues of revising and tracking conflict that come up as you’re in the process of hacking your first draft to pieces.
This is one of those area’s that can be tricky to work through, and require a lot of effort to get right.
I want to make sure I cover all the possible problems AND the solutions.
It’s an interesting writing night.
How are your words coming?
I threw out 364 words I wrote last week, and wrote 738 new words on TalysMana tonight.
The clue I got while posting my last TalysMana post last week, where I suddenly realized that the story would be more interesting if Bill were present when the next big thing happened, led me to toss everything I’d done on Lightcross, Shadowcross, and redo it.
It paid off. I actually like what I got on the scene—and writing it filled out a couple of neat details of Bill’s personality that made him a smart protagonist, and fit in with who I’d already said he is. And added some good conflict.
Tomorrow I have to see what Kettan does with the situation. But I’m excited to write that.
How are your words coming along?
