Fleeting Shadows

 Ah, shoot. As I look at the calendar, I think I have already forgotten specifically what I worked on.... Hmm.

Thus far, I have been successful at working on my writing each day! That is the goal! For 20+ minutes, and having stuff I have written down.

Friday was some minor progress on my regular manuscript, still getting Edith to Chani.
Saturday was the OCLS Writers Conference! Where I did write something small, and took a lot of notes, and thought about how all of that advice can help me immediately  in my novel.
Sunday was Inklings again, and more specifically, me organizing my notes for The River, from a jumbled 30k mass in a single flat file to a whole bunch of files organized in Scrivener. If that is the strength of the program, I had best exploit it! It should be much easier now to find the info I need and to add more in a good format.
Monday is the day I work on The River's weakness: I began in 2018 with an outline and an understanding of the direction it goes, but I never applied true structure to it. For the near future, until I finish the book (I can take it slow since I got it for Christmas, rather than fretting over a library due date and NaNo runtime...), I am running through Save The Cat! to ensure that I build up a more cohesive plot line. This won't necessarily solve my problems, but it can't hurt! And every bit of this is directly tied to the notes I am taking and the brainstorming I am doing and the eventual tight outline I hope to create!

 Having spent most of the day away from home, today is another light day, writing this romance scene that may never exist. It's helpful to figure out how I expect my current ideas of these people to interact, and how I imagine my hazy and vague story to continue. Tomorrow is a write-in day, which means I'll have more time to address this well and maybe get back on track with the legitimate prose creation. These characters have so far to go and so much, yet so little, to do.

Day 4 is more minimal hypothetical romance writing.



(OPO is Selva's song, but that's a universe away. It wouldn't leave my head, but now she's there, as I knew she would be.)

 So, I was counting yesterday already since it was a write-in day, but the goal both yesterday and today has been to figure out how the romantic relationships actually work amongst my main characters.

The work itself is already an unwieldy monster, and it promises to be more so before it resembles a novel, but I am currently giving it two halves: the initial goals of the main characters and their winding efforts apart and then together to solve what is, ultimately, the same problem, and then the further journey in pursuit of a much higher goal and all of the adventures and challenges that come with it. The main character gets involved in one or two concurrent relationships in the first half, mostly sexual and casual, though perhaps they mean more to her than she will admit, or than they do to her partners. In the second half, she settles on one of those partners, who is also now interested in pursuing a more solid relationship, which follows them through to the end of the work.

Humans are probably even more likely to hook up when the world is ending, but I still wonder if all the sex will even fit at all. Honestly, it's up to me to make it work. I want it to be a thing for the MC, for how she grows as a person and figures herself out. It's very fitting for her, but how explicit it is depicted depends on the tone I want the story to have. I still need to figure out when they do any of this at all! It's a process, and a long one.

Brainstorming time done for Day 1 and Day 2, with a bit of prose and research to go with it.