Words/Time:  1 hour, 17 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “Vin” as well as some free writing with a prompt.

I again started out with the writing practice, which took about 50 minutes. I may have to try to write shorter bits for the writing practice, if I want to keep starting my writing time with it every day, because while writing practice is always good, it doesn’t help as much with the actual moving forward toward producing books as the real work does. And this one was a doozy. I didn’t even really write that much. I haven’t counted it, but it didn’t look like 50 minutes-worth of writing. Granted, it was handwritten, but still.

It’s possible that the lengthy free writing lately is just a reflection of how much I miss the actual writing when I’m doing a lot of work in other phases of writing, like now. Today’s prompt was almost too easy though–“The first time falling in love, years after the death of your soulmate.” It allowed me to explore the beginnings of a relationship that I have really only so far written about after the couple is established. Maybe that’s also why it went so long.

The rest of the time was spent starting a new character interview in the hopes of understanding some of the main plot of “Vin.” This one should be interesting, as I will be talking with a character who has so far only been in “Pithea.” The very first time I ever thought about trying to talk with my characters, it was with this character, discussing “Pithea.” But it was all in my head while I worked in my dad’s blacksmith shop. It produced some brilliant insight, but when I tried to re-create the conversation on paper later, it just wasn’t the same. Then I didn’t really try anything like this again for about 3 years.

I’ve brought him into character interviews since then, but there were always other characters. As strange as it might be for me to say this (I’m aware this is all a bit strange), I’m looking forward to a one-on-one conversation with him after all this time.