Tired tonight…

Yesterday was a good day.  We explored the locked room, got into all sorts of character development, and wound up with almost two thousand words written.

Today has involved lots of running about, and for a while there I thought I was only going to get a few hundred words down.  But, I managed some more time and dragged my characters through a couple more scenes (including one scene which probably deserves better and may get it in a revision), to wind up only 96 words behind.  Today, I’m calling that a victory.  Especially because I ended with Lyra starting another story (kind of–I’ve been having her tell backstory like it’s a separate story), and her stories are always good for my word count.  So I’m hopeful for tomorrow.

That’s all I’ve got tonight.  Have a paragraph.

It takes a very special sort of mind to be interested in whether one’s ability to light a candle magically is affected by the waning and waxing of the moon.  Maybe if the candle exploded during the full moon, that would be interesting, but Eleanora never observed any effects so dramatic.

So I guess I got the hang of Thursday after all.  My expected distraction today didn’t develop, and I got a nice 1,733 words written.  Which would be excellent–but it turned out that it was yesterday I couldn’t get anything done!  Fortunately, I had that big cushion built up, so I finish out today 174 words behind the goal.  That’s a paragraph or two; I can deal with that.

It’s a funny thing about those word-count cushions.  You build what seems like a nice big one, a thousand words or so ahead of the game and the chart looks so pretty with the “written” line up above the “target” line…and then one slow day knocks it all out.  I was out most of yesterday evening, and I swear I was going to be good and write when I got home…but then I had a package.  And I’m compulsive about packages, they have to be opened, and if it’s something fun…well, it was a new picture, so it had to go on the wall, and by that point I figured Lyra and Dastan could wait until today.

Which they very nicely did, and still showed up to get work done tonight.  And anyway–if I ever got too far ahead, I suspect I’d lose all my motivation.  There wouldn’t be any challenge then!

Tonight’s excerpt:

There are many locked doors in our castle.  We’ve slept behind a locked door every night, for as long as I can remember.  Any doors leading outside are locked.  There are all sorts of spare rooms that are kept under a key.

But the most incontrovertibly locked room, the room that was kept the most inviolate, the most untouched and unvisited, was our mother’s.  It had been locked the day she died and, as far as we knew, it had never been opened.

Mother and Father had always had separate bedrooms; it’s common enough among royalty, although I suppose they must have, you know, visited.  There are twelve of us, after all.  But anyway, Mother had a room that was just hers.  Vira remembers it.  I don’t.

I think we get to visit the locked room tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to it.  🙂

It’s mid-month–I can’t tell at all if I’m mid-novel–but I am mid-wordcount!  In fact, I passed 25,000 pretty early this evening, and am now almost 1,500 words ahead on the word goal.  I had a very strong Friday and Saturday, and have managed a bit extra the last two days too.

All of which adds up to a very good thing, because I may be having another “can’t write anything” Thursday.  I haven’t had a good writing Thursday yet this month, and I’m not hopeful for next week either (being Thanksgiving, you know).  It’s just something about the day.

Now I have to quote Douglas Adams: “It must be Thursday.  I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”

So I’m happy about my word count for now.  Although it made me even happier yesterday when I hit on a relationship quirk for my characters.  There must be an official name for the concept…but it’s some back and forth that two characters keep doing throughout the book, and that probably will be used to reveal their connection.  In Red’s Girl, Red always denies needing help whenever Tam helps him, but then thanks her; by the end, she says “you’re welcome” before he gets to the thank you part.  In The People the Fairies Forget, Anthony is forever shortening Catherine’s name to Cat over her objections, until finally an emotionally pivotal moment causes her to admit she likes it–which he always knew.  Relationship quirks.

And then yesterday Dastan suggested that he and Lyra do a daily trade of ways they’re different from their multitudes of siblings.  Not sure of every way I’m going to use this, but I think it’s going to help.

I did have a nice writing point here…oh yes, that the word count is good but having a sudden character or plot breakthrough is actually more satisfying than sheer number of words.  Which is intriguing though not really surprising.

I also think I’m slightly more incoherent tonight than usual.  Lyra wanted to tell a story, so I did a lot of flowery, Brothers Grimm-style writing, and I think now I’m having a reaction, manifesting itself as random chatter.

Don’t mind me.  Too much typing.  Let me find you an excerpt and then I’m off for the night…

I know, you can have the beginning of Lyra’s story, which will probably make it on here in its entirety for some Fiction Friday.  For now, an excerpt:

Once upon a time, there was a shopkeeper’s daughter who was very beautiful.  It was a sad fact that because she was beautiful, people’s automatic inclination was to do things for her.  That might not have been so bad in itself, but she had realized this tendency early on and loved to take advantage of it.

When her mother asked her to clean the house or to help with the laundry, she’d make endless excuses to get out of it, preferring to spend the time combing her hair or trying on different dresses.  When her mother did insist on her working, she was so slow about it that the good woman would eventually give up in exasperation and do the job herself.

When her father asked her to mind the shop, she would avoid helping customers if at all possible, and when she couldn’t avoid it she was as slow as you could imagine.  She asked the customers to pack up their own purchases and couldn’t be bothered even to do the counting to hand out change.  You may expect that service was slow and the customers ended up waiting around, whenever she was minding the shop.  The men, however, so enjoyed looking at her that they didn’t often complain.  Still, her father knew that he was losing business because not everyone was willing to wait—and he wasn’t winning customers to his shop from the women in town.

One day the prince of that country passed through the town and his party stopped at the shop to buy fresh supplies for their journey.  It happened to be a day when the girl was (in theory) helping in the shop.  The prince saw her, and was sure that he had never seen anyone so beautiful, which may have been true.  He had been reading too many stories, and become convinced that such a beautiful face could only indicate a kind nature, a worthy spirit, and a personality that would match his own—in other words, that her beauty proved she was his soul mate, which it didn’t at all.

Somehow, it’s almost halfway through November.  How does that happen?

I’ve had a very inconsistent week.  As I had hoped, I managed to build up a cushion on Wednesday.  Then on Thursday I wrote exactly ZERO words.  I knew that was going to happen though–I was out all evening for a party with friends.  So as Friday dawned, I was 600 words behind.  I closed the gap a bit Friday, and then today…today has been lovely.

I think today has been what my life might look like if I didn’t have a job and could write all the time.  I’m not usually one for sitting down and writing for hours at a time.  By necessity I’ve been writing for a couple hours every evening (when I can) this month, but usually I’d rather work in maybe half-hour stretches (barring those rare moments of ultimate inspiration).  I had a fairly clear day today, so I spent it alternating writing and everything else.  Eat breakfast; write for a while; go grocery shopping; write for a while; run an errand; write for a while; and so on.

And the grand total–which you already know if you’re looking at my sidebar–was 20,744 words.  That was almost 2,600 today, and it puts me about 750 up on the goal.  One of those good days.

I think I’m foreseeing some good word count days in the future.  My long-awaited second major character who finally turned up earlier this week likes to talk.  I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned his name–it’s Dastan, and he’s one of the princes in the story.

It tends to go that my plan is, say, to drop my narrating princess, Lyra, into any of the boats, just to get her over to the castle and move things along.  Instead, Dastan jumps in to say, “hey, she can ride in my boat, and we’ll have funny and/or character revealing conversations along the way!”  And then they do.  I’ve been a little worried about some future developments in their characters and their relationship, but I don’t think I need to be.  They’ll figure it out.

I have a feeling the above-paragraph may sound insane to non-writers.  Those of you who are writers, you know.  Characters do things like this!

Anyway.  It’s encouraging.  I like talkative characters.  Sometimes I have to go back and rein the in during revision, but it’s still helpful for a first draft.

Excerpt time.  Slight context here: Lyra and Dastan are in his boat en route to the enchanted castle where all that dancing is going on.  It’s just come out that there would be a way for the princesses to escape if they choose to.  And it may help you to know the princes are from a fairly small island country.

“What would you do?” I asked.  “If we decided to run?”

“I can’t speak for my brothers…”

“I didn’t ask about them.”  People always assumed that my sisters and I were of one mind all the time; we encouraged it, but it still frustrated me.  “What would you do?”

He shrugged one shoulder.  “I’d be sorry.  And I’d say Godspeed and good luck.”

“You wouldn’t try to stop us?”

He looked away, across the water.  “How do I put this…  I love my country.  It’s a good place.  And I’ve been trapped there my entire life.  Since the spell, sure, but before that too.  I’m not really a believer in trapping other people.”

“Try being trapped in just a castle.”

“I’d rather not.  How do you stand it?”

Do you know, no one had ever asked before.  My sisters had known me forever, and they were all in the same situation besides.  No one else at home would have that kind of conversation with us.  They wouldn’t ask—and even if they did, we wouldn’t answer.  Our anonymity held us together, but it kept us separate too.

So there was a definite thrill to answering, “I read stories.  In one way I’ve never been out of the castle—until now—but in another way…I’ve been so many places.”