After some wheelspinning, 2000 words

By Holly Lisle

I actually got to settle in and write on Talyn today. The last few days have been tough, because I’ve been doing background and set-up work, and dealing with having two of my three guys sick, (there is nothing that will levitate a sleeping mother from the bed like the sound of a kid who is [A] barfing, and [B] still in bed.)

And I’ve been fighting to get Talyn’s voice back. She has a unique cadence to her speech, and a unique perspective on the world, and she hasn’t been living inside my head for over a year, since I wrote the first version of the proposal. Make that … two years? Pretty close.

It’s taken me some time to get her voice back, and I’m still fighting with it in places, knowing even as the words are coming that sometimes I’m missing her. I’m close, but I’m not always quite there. Which means I’m writing scenes that I already know are going to have to be revised for voice, and that can be some bitch work — it’s picky and slow and hard to hit.

The upside of this is that I got my 2000 words to day, and a good scene, in which Talyn gets her first hazy view of the hero (who is a long way from being her hero at the moment, incidentally,) and we get to see her in action in battle.

I’ll get the voice thing. By the time I’ve done 250,000 words, with more than half of the book in her voice, I may not be able to shake Talyn’s voice. But I’m not there yet.

ADDED LATER: I just found the weblog entry where I finished the proposal for Talyn. November 19, 2001. I knew it had been a while. Also had some fun (?) looking over some of those old entries. Lots of computer crashes, lots of hard drive reformats. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my iMac?.

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