Good Writing Day! Broke 20K!

Oh, man, I thought I'd never cross that line. Today was my most productive day yet on the Stisele project.

20,387 / 50,000 (40.8%)

New words: 2567 Made today's quota and caught up the new deficit from yesterday. Came up one word short, had no mind left for a whole new sentence of story, and so looked for an old sentence to stick exactly one more word into. The one more word was--Ezra Pound forgive me!--an adverb.

Current deficit: Back down to 2951.

Working conditions: I should know better by now than to attempt my first writing shift of the day directly onto the laptop. I spent 3 hours (!) producing 669 words, and then this evening spent 3 hours producing the other 1898 by jumpstarting my brain with a longhand hour.

Notable incidents: We're in Chapter Three now. Semi-villainous Jrene's doing her duty by the royal line and wishes she were dead. Poor girl. It's a pity and a shame she has so alienated her siblings that they regard her misery with a combination of revulsion and fascination. Stisele's 13 in this chapter, and any minute now I will send her off to war. Any minute now, if I can just get out of these interminable scenes in which she and Harentil fuss with one another's hair.

I figured out why I got stuck in Chapter One for so long. In the last book, I had a bunch of viewpoint characters, and anytime I needed to change the POV to get new information to the reader, a new chapter just happened all by itself (well, in the most recent draft, anyway). But in The Traitor of Imlen, I only have one viewpoint character, unless you count the tiny little interludes from Laurebes's flawed biography of Stisele. As a result, the whole book feels like one big chapter to me. If I'm not changing viewpoint characters to get from the seventh year of Stisele's life to the 13th, then it feels perfectly natural to get through those six years between plot points through tedious continuous narration of every goddamn day.

Fixed it: Said to myself, you don't have to think about 13-year-old Stisele as a different character to recognize that she has a different mind. Developmentally, she has a radically different brain at that point. And if there's one thing Stisele's good at, it's changing her mind, even once she's grown and on her way. (In that sense, she's kind of refreshing, after two years of writing about the House of Ythrae and the stubbornness that is their besetting family dysfunction.)

I spent my first writing shift of the day at Starbucks with Breva the Axe, who is coming unglued about her impending dissertation defense. This is a perfectly natural, predictable response to the ordeal. While talking her down enough so she could begin her day's revisions, I found myself saying a lot of things about the dissertation process that are probably applicable to writing and publishing novels. What do you guys think?

( some bits of that conversation that might be applicable )

The Halfway Mark in Sight, I Pine for Clausewitz

22,123 / 50,000 (44.2%)

New words: 1736

Current deficit: 2882 Shrinking again!

Working conditions: Longhand at Starbucks in New Brunswick in afternoon with fretful Breva the Axe; after-dinner excursion to B&N with Dan, where I typed from longhand notes while he did research for the GURPS campaign we run; ineffectually attempting to type fresh words while we watched the second half of The Two Towers; typing fresh words in my study after Dan went to bed. Persistent cat on keyboard.

Notable accomplishments: In addition to exceeding quota slightly, I reworked all my Stisele chapter documents into standard manuscript format (which I should have done in the first place when I set them up, duh), and set up correctly formatted new files for the Laurebes interludes, which I hadn't bothered with before November. I had to do something! I had accumulated a small mountain of hard copy with no page or chapter numbers, and was driving myself crazier than strictly necessary.

Notable story incidents: Stisele witnessed death in battle for the first time today. She can see the spirits of the dying as they leave their bodies, and it really freaks her out. Also, Harentil's about to get shipped off to Twenty Locks to study medicine. Harentil doesn't mind so much, because it's what she had in mind to do eventually anyway, but Stisele's heartsick, since the House elders intend it as a sort of banishment. That'll teach those girls to sneak The Book of Cloud out of the library! Keep 'em separated.

Those of you who watched while I bludgeoned my inner scholar to death in my desperate bid to escape from academia will be surprised to read the following sentence:

It pains me terribly that I cannot immerse myself in research.

Back in October, I bought a lovely clothbound edition of Clausewitz's On War, thinking I would have time for some research before Nanowrimo started. Joke's on me. Didn't get to it. The book is flirting with me from across my study. It has...not masculine wiles, exactly, though if the book had a gender, it would certainly be masculine. Informational wiles, that's what they are. Every time I run into a plot problem, I am absolutely certain that reading Clausewitz would make everything come clear. On War is now among the books to which I impute bizarre salvific powers. (And if only I made time to finish Carlyle's The French Revolution, then Hands of Beltresa would magically become irresistible to editors and agents, through the power of its luminous accuracy. Really. And it will, too. Just you wait and see!)

At least it's been a good teaching day. Four weeks ago, when I first met my newest student, Model U.N. Girl, she was unable to name, let alone define, ANY of the parts of speech. Today, she was able to explain in her own words what it means to say that a verb tense is simple, progressive, perfect, or both progressive and perfect. I'd like to be able to claim credit for her improvement, but it's so dramatic, this has to be a case of native ability previously unprompted.