Strictly a character night tonight—the scene’s POV character has a thing for my MC…something I sort of knew. Developed last night’s albatross analogy a bit further, dug into their relationship and how he hopes her visit to his dig will go.
Not the sort of night that sets the world on fire, but it was necessary and interesting. It sets up some important events I have planned later in the book, and will give them emotional impact.
That’s me.
What about you?
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Wonder the romantic scene in your dealings.Not working!shocked n putoff by your take for romance.
About a hundred words yesterday, sitting at a sushi bar, while my niece shopped. Its not 500 but I am not going to give myself grief over it. There are some ways in which my story is still forming in my mind. If I somehow counted all the thinking I do about it as I go about my day, and even dream about it at night, its a lot of activity.
2300 for yesterday and 2100 today. I just wish I could type faster, my ideas are too many for my fingers to follow. 🙁
1378 today. Got stuck (again!) and unstuck. It’s weird. I thought I would only get stuck if I didn’t know what to do with my characters or how to move the story forward. Instead I’m getting intimidated by what I want to accomplish and how exactly I should do it. I am finding it helps to just start in the middle of the scene and work my way forward and backwards from there. Seemed to help free up the ‘fear of the first few sentences’ I was facing. It might even be the transitions between scenes that’s causing the problem. I’m not sure yet although that would explain why starting in the middle helped so much today.
Anyway you guys are great. I think if I didn’t have this post I would just do something easier…like read a book. LOL
Many hours of revisions, word for word review, looking for stuff I dropped. Tedious but useful. Fun Factor: Found a new soft spot in my MC and can’t wait to make her suffer for it. Muaahhahaha!
749 words had to do adult stuff yesterday (refii paperwork) so no writing, but got a great new rate, will close (Hopeluly) in Sept. Today was fun some action finally things are rolling along.
1528 words I’m jazzed about. Happy writing night for me!
1349 words for me today. The writing is rolling along at a good clip. I’m feeling a bit tired (I think it’s the heat) so I’m going to stop for today.
794 words, and my heroine’s done something stupid. Or is it? I’m not sure. She was supposed to defend herself against a mugger, but she went and mugged him first. This will only bring him on her tracks. Or was that what she’s after? Does she want to draw all the fire on herself, to save someone else? Or because she wants the villains to make a mistake? I’m not sure whether to be frustrated or intrigued.
Just joining in. Finally wrote something last night. 619 words of meh, but at least it’s a start. I dreamed up ways of improving it last night, including a twist on a cliched character.
Welcome to the fun =)
Hello! Glad to have you here and congrats on the word count!
Thanks, everyone. 🙂
I wrote about 503 words, connecting the main body of my story with a scene I created a while ago. Now its finally all one piece again.
But I did more, for I refined the outline of what I want to rewrite and how.
On the downside, I realized that I have to start with those changes already now, instead after finishing the first draft. Otherwise I just won’t know for sure how to continue, how the characters should react, etc..
Well, I’m looking forward to this, but I guess it will be a bit difficult to do a proper word-count till I’m finished with all the rewrites and inserts and an occasional delete.
425w. Yay! Drunken BFF on MC’s couch. Not entirely sure how I’ll get her out of there, but progress is progress!
Sat down today with no direction in mind and ended with 1000 words. Very happy and unexpected surprise.
P.S. Holly, just in case you didn’t see: I answered your question about starting school on my last post (from August the 8th).
I nearly finished revising my 25K (the first third of my WIP) but my middle daughter came home early from school. Well, it’ll be tomorrow then. At least I’ve still got two days before I promised to hand it to the agent. I also translated 1458 words and have now slightly more than 26K, Yay! Tired to the bone though. So with luck, I’ll simply forget about the washing and call it an early night.
I got 200 words. Right now it going slow, mainly because I feel sluggish. I know why I feel sluggish though, and I plan to fix that tomorrow.
No words yesterday, sidelined by a migraine. Maybe today.
513 today.
I am feeling the need to dramatise more and not just descriptively relay the events of the story.
Although this is a minor triumph in itself (it means I am learning), it left me feeling panicked and despondent. I wondered whether I should go back and do it now or carry on and go back later.
I decided on the latter. My instinct is to move forward and get everything down on paper first. I want the story and characters to materialise and feel more solid before I start revising them. But I can’t deny that I am full of trepidation; I know the further I walk down the wrong path, the more arduous my return when I reach the dead-end.
Today was (for me) a good word count and a valuable lesson but I do not feel happy.
I’m sorry! I totally agree. It is so hard not to know for sure that all your effort is not wasted. I was curious, is your story/plot line changing completely or are you just telling it differently now?
Just telling it differently.
It feels flat when I read it back. It is a relaying of events. Perhaps a different narrative style would perk it up.
I will leave it to the end though, I don’t want to sidetrack myself too much. I just want to get the whole thing down on paper. What comes after I will worry about after.
I could be totally wrong about this, because I’m really new to writing, but…how clearly do you see the story/scenes in your mind? When I started out I simply wrote down What Happened, as you did, the narrative, which was okay but never really “flew”. I tried not to worry about it, but then as I wrote more, the story started to come into better focus. That is when the narrative turned into a scene that I could picture in my head, that is when the story turned into something real for me. Once it became real, the writing got better. (not perfect but better!) I don’t know how to make that happen other than to keep writing, and it doesn’t happen for me all the time. But the pictures in my head do get clearer the more I write. (It’s kind of addictive, actually.) Hope this makes some sense and helps.
Writing group says N’tal is a bad leader, I intended him to be a good leader going through a difficult time. However, I have never really liked writing about war. It isn’t on my sweet spot map, but I decided to go forward because I didn’t know how else to tell the story I wanted to tell. Now I think I do, and I’m taking stuff off of my sweet spot map to get there – spies, secret meetings, assassins, things that go skulk in the night.
From commander of an army to lead agent of an undercover team N’tal goes. So today I’m going to begin the necessary changes. That way I won’t go mad trying to continue a story that I want to love but can’t. Don’t know how the writing group will feel but I’ll certainly be happier!
1015 today! I blogged about this “write a book with me” today and got a great response, by the way. 🙂
I got 2,362 words Tuesday night! I am so thrilled that I am almost at 15k now, and this is the furthest I’ve ever gotten on a book! Poor Ryan got dragged halfway across the continent by creatures he’s never heard of, let alone seen before, his best friend was killed, and now it seems that there is no hope for escape. He’s kinda wallowing in self guilt and pity, and he’s trying his best not to fall apart after all that has happened, but I keep throwing so much at him I’m starting to wonder how much abuse he can handle.
Meh, he’ll do all right…the ironic thing is that his dead friend is being a lot more influential than I thought he would be. 🙂
There was supposed to be a 1 in front of that number
ACTUAL Word Count = 1982
Re-write of the first scene still has my MC convinced someone may be a vampire, but she now has some grizzly murders and circumstantial evidence to support her theory – that and her (soon to be earned) degrees in Pathology and Forensics.
Plus, a move from Mid Michigan to Southeast Michigan changes a huge facet of the story and make for more collateral damage in an up coming scene.
I thought about scraping the scene where my male MC is cut in half by a flying door, but his botched resurrection via necromancy is too fun and makes his story arc more interesting and powerful.
Word Count = 982 :]
Well I wound up with 697 yesterday–after axing the lion’s share of the scene I’d been writing. It just wasn’t working and I realized (courtesy of my ever so observant CP) that was because I had the sequel portion of the previous scene planned out but none of the actual SCENE. So I cut back everything but the sequel section, expanded it, and moved into the action the relates to the decision made in the sequel. The scene still isn’t finished, but it’s well on its way. I hope to knock it out today and maybe start the next one.
420 words. Working my way towards the “candy bar” scene I wrote last Friday. I realize now that I should have just summarized it and held off (as motivation to keep going), but luckily I only have a few more scenes to go until the story joins back up with it. I’ll do an edit and that will have to be my candy bar…
ditto on the 429. Continuing with MC’s romp in the park and now that’s drawn out the rebel’s attention she’s brokering a deal and offering a sacrifice that will cost her dearly later. But in her view, how else can she learn the self-control to keep her powers from exploding and incinerating her?
It’s coming along nicely. Only issue this week is a lot of work interruptions and covering different offices for vacationing coworkers. Might have to switch to night writing.
381 words. Tired. Busy work-week, plus it’s oppressively hot and humid here. My least favorite kind of weather. But one thing I’ve learned, as a direct result of participating in this challenge, is that I can almost always get 250 words banged out in under an hour. That other world is always waiting for me. It’s leaving it behind I find most difficult. Sometimes I feel like I’m lugging around an old, battered suitcase, with innumerable compartments, some of them easily accessible, some locked. All stuffed full of odds and ends of thought, half-fiinished scenes, and fleeting impressions, which gets heavier and more cumbersome every day.
Grrrrrr. Tired, and this weather doesn’t help.
I really love your description of your story- mental baggage. And as cumbersome as you’ve made it sound, it sounds just as romantic. Which I’m sure it is.
Also- I hate hot weather, too. We had 100+ degree days a week ago, and are now, blessedly, back to rain and cloudy skies.
Only 332 for me yesterday. I was going to take a break, but it didn’t work out so well. I am having trouble with this scene for some reason: I know what has to happen, what happens is important, adn I think it’s interesting. I just can’t seem to finish it. I’ve started it twice, and just couldn’t finish it. I think I’ll try it from a different POV this time, and see if that solves my problem. If it keeps up I;ll just have to skip it (grr). But, I did a great job (if I do say so myself) on the other scenes I skipped and later came back to, so if I have to, all is not lost, lol.
Hi Khena,
I don’t know if this will work for you but I got stuck on a scene the other day. I knew what I wanted to have happen, etc but I really didn’t know how to get there. And I knew it would end with my MC reacting in pain. So I started there and just worked my way backwards. For some reason it totally unstuck me and it was easy to figure out just the immediate previous step and keep going the wrong way. And I still came up with some things I hadn’t expected. I think it took my mind off “how am I going to get from point A to point B” and instead just focus on one tiny piece at a time.
Maybe it will help. I haven’t used it again so I’m not really sure whether it was a fluke either. LOL
I’ve done that myself a week or two ago, and it did work well for me. Thank you for reminding me of it, I’ll give it a try next time I run into this problem. For this scene though, I figured out what was wrong: I was doing things in the wrong order. Now that I have a solid start, I should be able to finish it up this evening… at least, I hope to!
Oh that’s geat. 🙂 Congrats!
My Spy is getting creepy…and obsessed. My heroine’s been stuffed down in a trash receptacle for “punishment” after working hard to save her people’s important documents and a cache. The hero lied to her about a Mr. Tesler. Yep, and she’s mad at him because of it. She knows she’s not perfect either, but when you save a guy’s rear end from nasty, flesh-eating enemy pets, there’s got to be compensation somewhere.
1681 words for the past two days. (Sorry, day ahead!)
560 words for me. Should clear 10k tomorrow!
Okee- I started over from page one after a total crisis of faith last night. I was being trite and forced and my lovely husband called me out on it. A review of How To Build A Plot and the First 30 pages of How to Build a Character got me some great material and also a kick in the butt to JUST START WRITING.
So I’m writing.
1101 words.
Congratulations! Hang in there. 🙂
Word Count: 486
I was able to finsih up the scene I had started to do last night. I had originally wanted to go into detail about a judge adressing candidates that had passed onto the next round about where they would be sleeping and doing, but decided against it. Figuring that with my MC, who didn’t stay down to listen to the speech, it would be more interesting for her to find out what was said as time moved on.
With this scene done, I was able to connect to a scene I had completed a long time ago and thusly end chapter four! 🙂
808 words today. My heroine receives a death threat. Too tired to post anything else.
1373 words.
One scene where our hero, after being turned into a vampire, stumbles upon someone that he’s been… unfriendly… with in the past and not really realizing he’s a vampire, he kills her.
Then, totally freaked out, he goes to the apartment he shares with his mother but… for some reason, I wrote this from the POV of his mother. She’s come home from a long night of work, and she searches around the apartment until she finds some drugs and she starts smoking them, trying to be quiet so she doesn’t wake up her son. She hears him rummaging around in his room and afraid he’ll catch her getting high, she hides her paraphernalia. Then she goes in to ask why he’s up so early… and there’s no one there. Just some soiled priest robes by the open window and a cold breeze.
I really intended to write this so that he was able to feel her disease with his new senses. And then he was going to find the strength to run away before killing her. But that whole part of the scene just never materialized. I may go back and rewrite this.
308 words tonight, and my hero now realizes his mistake in talking to the reporter, but is helpless to do anything about it. My heroine is still stuck in her torn apart kitchen, and tomorrow night, she’ll finally get to move again.
600+ words, and (to my great surprise) an action scene that (I think) doesn’t really suck.
Also, a future plot development based on “OK, what’s the worst possible thing that can happen right now? Not the obvious worst but the worst possible thing?”.
Still moving through Chapter 7.
The battle against the nightmare creature is well underway now. Today the group of heroes finally had a chance to start fighting back.
Crossed 15K total words.
Word count for today: 416
599 words today. Cricket’s first information source is, as it turns out, dead. (This is not suspicious as he was an old man.) She’s not deterred, but she’s about to get yelled at by the next source!
Only 49 words for me today, but a technical victory! I had NO time to work on it, but I managed a whopping 10 minutes anyway.
Congrats – every little bit counts! 🙂
Yes congratulations! I’m rooting for you! 🙂
Thanks, Jamie D. and Gabby! *muah*!
I’m still plotting, and I’m getting close to the end. However, I’m having a LOT of trouble joining the important main events in my mind together with other scenes that lead up to them. I want every scene to count, and right now I can only think up filler scenes. So I’ve been working on that, and I’m going to keep working into the wee hours.
I am writing one of the scenes about the wonders and dangers within the magical river. Although I am aware, there are ever more intriguing entanglements, I am choosing to trust that this is the first draft and all is well. Whether all is truly well or no, remains to be seen, Goddess only knows when.
509 words. I had some fun tonight. My MC was killing time walking through a vegetable garden when she showed me how much she loves fresh peas from the vine. I didn’t know this about her. It amazes me how “my” character knows more about herself then I do.
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