Persistence Is Key

Well there’s one good thing about doing NaNoWriMo, at least you know I’ve been writing, right?

Perhaps it hasn’t been good writing, but at least I’m starting to catch up. I’m still about 4,000 words behind as I type this, but then I haven’t started working on today’s words yet. So we’ll just have to see how distracted I am today.

One of the reasons Chris Baty chose the month of November for NaNoWriMo was because it’s such a dreary month. The problem with this for people like me is that the dreary weather can often create dreary mind sets.

We’ve been getting some sun, but it’s usually a very thin filling in between two slices of greyness – not really enough to charge my solar batteries. Add to that I’ve been having mystery headaches that come in clusters and you’ll understand when I say I’ve fought for every word I’ve written.

And I’ll confess right here, they haven’t been pretty words. But there have been a few surprises. I wrote a rather long back story to one of my characters, thinking it would probably end up cut during the editing process, but although it might get tightened up some, I think I’ll keep it. It concerns one of the main characters, and this character has pretty much only been mentioned by name in a previous book.

I’m getting a better handle on the Illezie prophecy – I keep adding refinements as I think of them. There’s a lot more of the Illezie in this book than I expected, and they’re turning out to be a lot more manipulative than I thought they were.

I’ve also given them a home world, a planet disguised as a gas giant. AND I figured out why they needed the Elementals, and why there’s five, instead of just four. But what I haven’t figured out why the as yet un-introduced sixth one is needed.

So, yeah. There’s a lot of crap that needs to be cut from the story, but it is moving along.

Goals For the Week

If I can finish catching up on NaNo then I can feel free to use part of my writing time for editing some more of the anthology. If I haven’t, then the goal is to finish catching up on NaNo.

Don’t forget to check back Thursday for a new excerpt.