Got up at five AM because Matt had to go into work early, and any real writing I hope to accomplish, I have to do while he has the five-year-old. (Or they’re both asleep.)
Hit the book, started into a pretty good roll, and got blindsided by a snag.
Talyn is part of a big family. Really big. She is one of fourteen kids, a number of her siblings have wives or husbands and families of their own, the family is close. I’ve established this since pretty much the first page of the book. I have had her interacting with several of her brothers and sisters, and talking about other ones. I did the first fifty or so pages of the book about two years ago, and did all my worldbuilding for it then, and did Talyn’s family tree then.
The worldbuilding pages are gone. I didn’t put them into a project notebook the way I usually do, because I was out — hadn’t been to the office supply store in a while, was close enough to broke not to spend money on frills. Background notebooks turn into frills when things are bad enough.
But today, Talyn is taking the prospective lover to dinner at her family’s house, and some of the family are there, and the rest aren’t but will be present in discussion, and I had to dig through over two-hundred-fifty pages of manuscript looking for casual references to this brother or that sister and what they did and where they are and I drove myself crosseyed and cranky. Beyltaak and the Confederacy of Hyre came very close to being hit by a lethal meteor this morning — and as for getting my words done ….?
Make me laugh. I think I might have gotten a couple hundred. The rest was spent searching for people, making up people, and putting data into the character database so all the brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews can’t get away from me again.
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