Words/Time: 1388 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 43rd meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through a little over 4 pages of double-spaced text, ending in a major issue that may take more work than normal to resolve. It’s especially a problem for me, because the issue is related to the first meeting of Missy and Jonathan. Missy being the female main character and Jonathan being really a side character in this book, but not in my mind. He becomes like a brother to Missy over the the next few years, but that doesn’t get to come out very well in this book, not like it had in the original version. As one sister put it, he’s very much like a cartoon character in the story right now, and I don’t necessarily hate that idea, but it probably means I don’t go deep enough with his character. And their first meeting has some huge issues, because I was trying to keep it close to the way it was in the original version, but doing that is what caused me so much trouble in the initial attempt at building this world. So there we left off, and I’m going to have to think about this scene, and the character as a whole, over the next week. Hopefully by next Tuesday night, when we have our next Skype meeting, I’ll have some thoughts to bring to the table.
500 Words Challenge
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 10, 2015
Words/Time: 30 minutes finishing the introduction of Drear, the narrator of “Pithea.” I then added that to my story blog, Made in Pithea, and proceeded to make the first post. Granted, that first post was mostly a copy & paste of the introduction to “Pithea,” but it still took some time to get ready and post. I’m happy I’ve been able to find some light work to do during this busy week, and come Monday, it’ll be back to actual revision.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 9, 2015
Words/Time: 20ish minutes working on a character profile for a new blog I’m setting up. I’m going to split things related to writing as a whole (my daily challenge check-ins, new group of “Write Every Day” posts, NaNo-related things) or my personal posts apart from posts about my story–the world, characters, plots, etc. I’m moving all of the latter to a blog called “Made in Pithea.” I’m working on getting it up with some pages of information (mostly about the narrator, whose voice I will use for most, if not all, of the posts and about the world I have created) and at least one beginning post. Then I will slowly introduce more characters, explain more of the world, and maybe drop some actual story now and then. I’m kind of excited, yet acutely aware that I’m a major novice at design, so the blog will be very plain. I actually have an idea for a sort of main image for Pithea (both the country and the book), but I’m just not a graphic artist of any kind. So that’s still a faraway dream. Anyway, yay, I got stuff done! Now I need to sleep for another early morning.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 8, 2015
Words/Time: 25 minutes typing new text into the computer for “Pithea.”
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 7, 2015
Words/Time: 32 minutes adding revisions for “Pithea” that were made on paper into the computer.
I am planning for a lighter week this week. My church’s VBS program starts tomorrow, and I’m a volunteer. For 5 days, I will wake up early, transport my two kids and their two cousins to church, then spend 3 hours taking the 2nd & 3rd graders around to the different stations. I did this last year (though with the next age group down) and remember being exhausted all week. So the rest of the evenings this week, I will work on my writing if I am alert enough and have time, but if not, I won’t feel guilty.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 6, 2015
Words/Time: 1124 words, revising “Pithea.” Naolin’s delusional, sick mind is shown a few more times (wow, not sick in the way that sort of made it sound…like, actually sick–poisoned, in fact). Missy and Drear don’t act so hostilely toward each other now (though I should probably find a place for him to actually tell her his name), and a lot of Missy mixing healing items and giving the unconscious man liquid (since I discovered weeks ago that that doesn’t actually work) has been removed.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 5, 2015
Words/Time: 992 words, revising “Pithea.” I’m going to go into more detail on the actual story than I normally do here, so bear with me. The book I am working on right now is a full rewrite of 5 shortish stories that I wrote as fanfiction around 10 years ago. They were fanfiction based on a video game that had very little plot of its own, so the plots and characters were completely my own invention.
Cut to more recent years, and I’ve built a new world of my own that will mostly accommodate those stories, yet be different from the game (in some ways, very different). The original stories were written as third-person limited POV, while this book is actually first-person, but told from a side character who is only in the second half of the book (and even then, somewhat sporadically). The part of the story I am working on now is when the main character meets the narrator character for the first time.
Originally, it went that Missy (the MC) had already seen Drear (the narrator) from a distance, and he’d kind of creeped her out. So when she found him later, bent over her sick friend, she assumed the worst. And that led to situations in which she mistrusted him, and it made perfect sense.
In the rewritten book, I tried to keep that mistrust (and the mystery about Drear being the brother of that sick friend). But basically, Missy has to break into Drear’s house and then act indignant. Drear’s identity being a secret is really forced, and his subsequent reveal is just clumsy.
So, though I’m very used to these scenes being one way (Drear doesn’t identify himself and Missy has good cause to think he’s untrustworthy) for 10 years, I am now finding that I have to almost completely re-plot what happens from this point forward. There’s no reason Missy can’t know right away who Drear is (he introduces himself at the beginning of the book and says he’s the brother of that other character), so I’m basically going to be rewriting the next several chapters. Which is kind of nice, because I’ve been missing the actual writing lately.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 4, 2015
Words/Time: 1059 words, revising “Pithea.” Missy’s first meeting with Aeldrim and Selunya is less awkward and forced. I hope. I went back to the original version from years ago to find the parts that I liked and hopefully it flows better now.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 2, 2015
Words/Time: 1155 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 42nd meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We finished the section on Pithean history that we started last week, which is a between-parts chunk of exposition. In the end, we felt pretty good about the whole thing, even though exposition is often thought of as boring. We do have a question about a really big issue that we will have to discuss further that will potentially break some of my world, but hopefully we can come to an answer that we like without ruining a foundational mechanic in my story world.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 1, 2015
Words/Time: 30 minutes responding to notes made on the TCSTB shared document by one of the other members, in anticipation of our Skype meeting tomorrow night.
A Journey of Words 