Sorry for the long silence, dear readers. Rest assured that I have not forgotten you but have instead been typing furiously away, and have produced 18077 words, or 63 pages, of uneven prose. My target is 2000 words a day, so as of yesterday evening I was two days ahead. But today I rested. What can I say? I was in a low-energy funk, couldn't kick my own ass but couldn't get a proper nap in, either. Instead I climbed in and out of bed, read a novel and pawed my way through the leftovers of Sunday's New York Times.
I'm primed and ready for tomorrow, although my characters are acting up. For one thing, I'm almost at the 20k mark and haven't told a twentieth of the story I want to tell. Secondly, the characters are starting to behave in ways I haven't expected. I've got a high school kid who forgot to put a condom on, for one, and he was supposed to be more responsible than that. But things just sort of happened, and neither he nor I are sure what's going to become of it. I kind of twinge each time they veer off like that. My carefully plotted outline is in tatters and pages and pages of character sketches have been pushed aside, either for eventual shredding or recycling into some other project.
There's also been some resistance to my attempts to shoulder from "literary" over into "science fiction". (Thanks to one of the Wrimos at the Cape Cod meeting for teaching me the word "slipstream" for this nebulous genre.) Should I abandon my overarching vision for these folks and just let them piddle around in the ho-hum everyday world? Or are they ready to sail into the East and learn what's really out there?
I'm still not sure.
Regardless, I'm still having loads of fun with it. Partly because I am, and partly because saying it again and again will make it true.
Comments