I was up early, which helped. Six AM gives you a bunch of extra day to work with.

But while I didn’t know what I was going to write this morning when I came in and sat down, I knew what the writing had to do.

And all I can say is that I pity the characters who show up out of my subconscious mind when I’m holding auditions for roles in novels. 

Such awful, scary, scarry things happen to them.

This was the day where scars were born.

And this was the day when a couple of my key characters were hoping that they could hide in the closet where I wouldn’t find them so they didn’t have to show up for work.

But they walked into the page (grudgingly and trudging) and embraced their roles (while calling me by some impressively bad names)… and my hands flew. This was the Bad Things Happen, Bad Things Get Worse, And THEN… part of the book.

Second half of the midpoint for the novel, and for the series, AND for the character.

It will get worse for her, of course. Still two and a half more books to go, and the darkest darkness comes in book five.

But today was where my MC had to prove that she CAN do what she believes she cannot do, because without this moment, without this action, she would never have a chance of getting anything that she loves through to the end.

She knows she is and has always been simply the wrong kind of person to do what has to be done — except she also knows that she’s it. The one person. The one chance. If she doesn’t do what has to be done, there isn’t anyone else… 

And while I was mentally gearing myself up to write this, having absolutely no clue what was going to happen today — only knowing why it had to happen… the still small voice of my Muse whispered, “We haven’t heard from Sam in a while…”

And the click that followed was a piece of my own childhood ripping itself out of my earliest memory and throwing itself onto the page, fitting disaster with survival, fitting monsters with home, holding my main character up and keeping her focused and resolute during an unarmed walk through an inescapable and unthinkable hell.

Today was a very, VERY good writing day.

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Passed the halfway point today with 1350 words, and 45,819 total. And I LOVE the words I got.

And as is fitting, the trouble I put my character into got worse — much worse — today. 

And while I don’t know yet exactly what I’m going to do tomorrow, I do know my main character’s situation is not going to improve.

I wave in front of the the words “raw maw”… and let you chew on that image for a bit.

I got a late start, but when I got rolling, the words flew, and the minor character I’ve used before, who stepped through to help her this morning, broke my heart just a little bit. 

He’s never gonna big a major player — but he’s a sweet, sweet guy, despite all appearances.

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Today was… awesome. Wickedly awesome.

But before I get to that, I’m going to note that I’m 531 words away from hitting the NOVEL mid-point and the SERIES midpoint. 

With that said, here is where I am right now.

I was tempted to run even longer than I did, but I left myself at an absolutely perfect spot to pick this up tomorrow, and here’s why.

When I stopped writing this morning: 

My main character is about to step into terrible danger to save someone important to her.

She is weaponless, helpless, and going into a situation in which the person she is trying to save is going to be fighting her (for a good, but also for a terrible, reason). Any mistake she makes will kill both of them, and everything she MUST do runs counter to everything she has ever learned about what she should do in situations like this.

It’s the perfect midpoint. 

Which is to say, it’s the main character in a bad situation that has suddenly become so much worse than anticipated, or planned for — where she cannot do anything she knows how to do well, where everything she wants to do is prohibited, where any mistake she makes will get her and everyone she cares about killed… 

And where doing nothing will have the exact same ending as doing the wrong something.

So she’s going to do something she’s never done, and is pretty sure she can’t do, knowing any mistake will be fatal…

And she’s going to see how THAT works out.

The thing is, today I wasn’t writing the scene I planned.

But because of my process, I didn’t have to, because even as I was writing against my outline, I planned toward being where I needed to be today to get this. 

Line-for-scene outlining combined with a workable novel structure — they work overall even when little pieces blow up and crash and burn.

I knew I needed to have something here around which to swing not just this novel but the two that follow it…

And everything I’d planned for this point wasn’t good enough.

But what my gut / Muse / left-brain Editor – right-brain Muse pitched at me in my 30-word replacement sentence this morning was.

I had an exciting few hours of writing, and I cannot wait to see what happens tomorrow. 

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Oh, MAN. Today’s scene was fun, and I’m only halfway through it. It was hard, hard, painfully hard to stop…

But I’ve left myself in a great place to pick up on Monday. AND… for what it’s worth, I’ll hit 45,000 words and the half-way mark on the novel AND the five-book series next week. 

As tempted as I was to keep writing, thinking that I could do that today if I wanted to… I’ve learned the hard way that the trick to being consistent on your writing is to know when to stop, and not just keep pushing past your objective.

When you do that, you start writing to failure.

WRITING TO FAILURE means that you keep expanding your word counts every day, pushing yourself harder and harder to do more than you did the day before, until you break. This is a self-inflicted form of writer’s block.

It’s mean, and I’ve done it before (a couple different times with commercial deadlines, in fact).

When you break, the words dry up, and you sit there staring at the screen, and you discover that by constantly punishing your creative brain, it has locked you out. Writing to failure is a great way to never finish the story, or the book… and a superb way to kill a writing career.

In any case, today I stopped when I ran a few words past my goal, and while it was fun, and while I’m excited to find out what happens on Monday when I come back to it.

ANYWAY…

While I was writing the scene today, a minor character from a previous book appeared suddenly, volunteering something that’s inside a big box he brought with him, because my MC helped him once — and because he liked the little personal gift my main character gave him when she did it.

And she has not opened his gift yet, so I don’t know what’s in it.

That’s cool. I’ll get to find out on Monday. 

Now on to all the other stuff on the Friday list.

Have a wonderful weekend, and see you again next week.

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Just a note that the words today did not come easy, that added that I started out by creating negative numbers by debugging a redundant chunk of yesterday’s scene, and that in spite of that, I did hit my goal.

My MC is in big, big trouble.

But now I have to go do all the other stuff on my list.

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Better yet, I got to include my favorite local restaurant, and a local (fictional) band, and the first meeting between my MC and a character who’s been dancing around the periphery of the story for two and a half novels.

Well, at 40,123 words total on this one, I won’t really be at the halfway point until I hit 45,000 — but I’m pretty close.

Meanwhile, I had fun, my characters had fun, there was scary business, there was some sleight of hand — and you just can’t ask for a better writing day than this one. 

So I won’t. I’ll just appreciate that today was a helluva lot more fun than yesterday, and will roll with tomorrow as it comes.

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Okay. I knew the fight scene was going to get messy.

I knew getting my MC home was going to be tricky.

Some of what I wrote yesterday was really good, and it put my character in exactly the right sort of danger.

Some of it wandered off into the weeds and got lost, and meandered around — and I had to burn down the weeds, cut the head off the meandering, and wipe up the mess afterwards.

Which is actually pretty much what’s now in the chapter. Chapter 11, FWIW.

And I like what I have.

I just ran out of time with fewer words than I would have liked to have.

Still, I can take the fixed, much better scene with me into tomorrow, and maybe make up some of the wordcount I fell behind on today.

Way more than three hours on this today, though.

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I was not expecting what happened to day. It wasn’t the sentence for this chapter in my life-for-scene outline — I had to write a new LFS sentence just to make sure it wouldn’t break the book when I started writing. But reworking the outline was definitely the right thing.

Along with meeting someone whose going to become increasingly important as the series goes on, my main character discovered that she only ever knew a very small part of who her grandmother had been.

Today, she discovered that one of the secrets hidden in the house she inherited had been sitting out in plain sight since she was a little kid…

And it’s still sitting there, waiting exactly where she left it.

And she’s now finished meeting the guy I’ve been waiting to introduce to her for two-and-a-half books. 

Their meeting didn’t go at all the way I expected.

It went better.

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Great writing day, my MC and the character who has been hidden inside the story until now finally get to meet… 

And it all worked.

I miss being able to do snippets, because I would have had a great one for today — but I have to keep the pseudonym separate from me until the books have a chance to find an audience in the Urban Fantasy / Fantasy readership.

Today just went really, really well.

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