I am by preference an outliner, not a pantser.
By preference I have a map for the novel I’m writing, and while I make take a small side road on the map rather than the freeway, in general I don’t abandon the damn car and go hiking through the woods and the weeds with nothing but a canteen and a pen knife.
But preference sometimes takes you where you’ve been before, and every once in a while, shoving the map in your back pocket and wandering in the direction of the sun can bring you to new ground, to sights previously unseen, and to vistas of wonder and delight.
Which is where I ended up today, and where I got envision enemies thrown into terrible chaos by the destruction of the core of their enmity discovering some strange, disturbing… but still HOPEFUL… common ground.
It’s lovely, weirdly funny ground.
And writing it made me happy.
* * *
By the way, I’ll note that my deadline still shows as June 12 for finishing the first draft of this novel. The massive derailment of my writing time while I did the things only I could do to get the HollysWritingClasses.com site live (and my end of it was pretty small, compared to the massive work my moderators did) was still enough to destroy that deadline. I haven’t had the heart to do the math to come up with an achievable new deadline yet. I have that on my Tiny Little List for Monday.
Just didn’t want anyone to look at that deadline and get excited. No way am I writing 3,258 words a day for the next ten working days. I’ll need 26 working days to hit the 90,000-word goal, and all the previous books have run long. I have every reason to expect that this one will, too. So I’m still a ways out from finishing the first draft. I just haven’t felt like fiddling with the Scrivener word count meter yet, because I would like to see what I can get done in that ten days.
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