I threw my characters into a frozen river today, and it felt good…
I am writing along to Sarah Hoyt's 13 Weeks to a Novel posts over at PJ Media, and her post for week four is particularly on target for me. How to find the time to write… well, I find it mostly by having little to no free time. Between school, and work, and a long-distance relationship, and my family time at home, I don't take time for me. Now, I'm not recommending this for you, or even for me, long term. I just need to do it right now.
This last week I have made very little progress on Pixie Noir, writing only two days so far this week, for a total progress of about 1800 words. So I am falling behind a little. Part of my problem was getting stuck on a transitional part of the story. There is a need, in telling a tale, to get our heroes from point a, to point b. But writing that out is, well, boring.
I figure that if I am bored writing it, my reader will be bored reading it. So this morning when I sat down to write, I started throwing rocks at my characters, metaphorically. By putting obstacles in their path, I create some action, and in this story, start introducing the system of magic in this world I am building. So I have a good excuse to gleefully threaten my characters with grievous bodily harm.
Now, because it's all going so well, I'm back to the grind. I plan one more hour of writing today, then I have math homework. Yay, multiplying and dividing polynomials. Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Why couldn't I have gotten an organized, logical engineer's brain instead of this wildly creative one? My house would be a lot tidier… and math would be less of a chore.