writing

A Monday Moment: Mistaken Identity

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Natos had specifically chosen to spend that day alone, not wanting to get caught up in his brother’s chaos for once. He figured Jaffna would be safe, because he’d heard Acronis discuss heading to Taellyn with some of the others. As soon as he heard the giggle right behind him, he knew he should have gone to Qulu instead. His brother and the others would never bother with that remote location.

Despite hearing her coming, he wasn’t expecting the arms to wrap around his body from behind. He let out a startled yelp and pulled away, turning around quickly.

“Inanna!” he said with a gasp.

“Oh!” Her face turned bright red and she covered her cheeks with her hands. “I thought you were Acronis!”

“I gathered,” he muttered.

“I’m so sorry!”

“Right…well, it’s not a big deal.”

“Maybe not for you,” she said breathlessly. “You’re…Natos, right?”

He refrained from rolling his eyes as he nodded his head. It wasn’t that he minded that this rather attractive young woman preferred his brother to him. But despite how little he cared to hang out with his Acronis and the others, he had been around a lot when Acronis was in Jaffna and spent time with Inanna. Was it that hard to remember his name?

“Is Acronis here too?” she asked, looking around the area.

“I don’t think so. I heard them talking about going to Taellyn today.”

She stuck her bottom lip out. “What’s in Taellyn? Who is in Taellyn?”

Natos only shrugged. He couldn’t tell her what he was thinking. I couldn’t even begin to care. Why on earth do you want anything to do with my brother or those others that he spends all of his time with? What must be wrong with you that this is the kind of attention you want?

The truth was, he had always seen signs that Inanna’s family was not much better than his own. He felt bad for the girl, but on the other hand, at least her life was better than his. At least she wouldn’t be expected to become a mercenary and assassin, living in the shadows for the rest of her life, never having the chance to have real connections with others. He could only hope that she didn’t waste her freedom—that she would outgrow this fascination with his brothers and find some better friends.

Prompt used: What if your character was mistaken for someone else?

Daily Writing Check-in: March 3, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 36 minutes finishing item #2 in my current writing goals list, and starting on #3.

Finishing #2 entailed finishing the outline for “Unexpectedly.” There are 4 character arcs for this book that I am outlining individually from each other:
Juris
Evan
Acronis
Rusalki

Today I finished Evan’s section, and completely outlined Acronis’s and Rusalki’s. I also hit on an idea for how to start the entire novel, showing the connection between all 4 characters right away, before the narrator, Drear, splits off their stories. I still don’t know for sure if I want the stories to be told simultaneously or linearly, but I’m pretty excited to have the starting point.

Upon realizing that I’m progressing through my list of long-term writing goals much more quickly than I anticipated, I decided to start keeping track of how long each one took as I move on to #3. (This is a count of actual days worked, so not counting days where I skipped working on writing, or worked on something else.)

1. Outline “Outcast” – Time spent: 12 days

2. Outline “Unexpectedly” – Time spent: 7 days

3. Re-outline “The Seeger Book” – I wrote the first draft of this for NaNoWriMo in 2015. It was the 2nd book I wrote that month, and came in at 43,672 words. It is a murder-mystery, and only the 2nd one I have ever attempted (the 1st murder-mystery I ever wrote was earlier that month, and it really fell flat). It needs some overhauling and almost an entire mid-section, because I jumped from somewhere in the middle to the climax when the end of the month neared and I realized I was out of time to figure out the rest of the plot. I also think I need to re-think the suspects, clues, etc. of the mystery aspect.

4. Re-outline “Vin”

5. Re-outline “Protector”

I do expect #3 to take considerably longer than the other 2. The first draft was not very well planned, so I have a lot of work ahead of me to figure out how the story even needs to go. I’m starting with reading the first draft to remember all of my ideas. Unfortunately, it is still in full NaNo-form, because I didn’t touch it at all afterwards.

Sometimes I’ll spend the first few weeks after November ends doing a quick clean-up of what I wrote–mostly removing things I marked as NaNo fodder and at least doing a quick spell check. This is usually better to do while the story is still fresh, and then it’s good to let it sit for some time.

So I’ve already done a quick spell-check, and I’ll remove the NaNo fodder as I read.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 2, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 18 minutes working on the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

There are 4 character arcs for this book that I am outlining individually from each other:
Juris
Evan
Acronis
Rusalki

Today, I completed the outline for Juris and created more than half of the outline for Evan.

For Juris’s arc, Juris is actually not the main character. The story is mostly about a developing relationship, and is shown more from his love interest’s perspective. I wasn’t sure if that was the right way to go at first, because the idea of this book is to show the lives of 4 people who are on 2 different sides of the same war, and I’m really showing someone else’s life more than the life of the person who’s actually in the war. However, I like the way we learn who Juris is through the eyes of his love interest, and frankly, the drama is better this way.

For Evan’s arc, I am struggling with a psychological component near the end of his arc that I have to make sure to pull off correctly, to avoid leaving the reader guessing about something that I don’t intend to be confusing. I’ll tackle this fresh tomorrow.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 1, 2019

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Words/Time: 396 words of free writing.

I didn’t get to my writing time until 11:30, so I knew I wasn’t going to have an easy time getting into anything substantial. I figured this was a good time to do some free writing and try to come up with something for the next Monday Moment. I knew a prompt of some kind would help a lot in getting started quickly, so I went to a blog that I know has prompts every Friday. I looked through several of the Friday posts, looking for a prompt that sparked a quick idea, and weirdly ended up back at the prompt posted today.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 28, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

Most of this time was spent continuing the character interview that I started yesterday, and the rest was spent reading through most of the original, unfinished version of “Unexpectedly.” This particular conversation has reached its conclusion, and I am ready to proceed with the outline.

goal tracker 19-2-28
My writing-time goal in February was to average 30 minutes per day. I surpassed, even making up for several days here and there of not writing at all. I probably won’t set my daily goal higher for March, but with April comes Camp NaNoWriMo, so I may push myself more then. It’ll depend on what’s going on at work by then.

DailyTime-30min-DebbieOhi-200

Daily Writing Check-in: February 27, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

I started out going over the broad plot points from the original version of “Unexpectedly,” marking out things I knew I wouldn’t keep. At that point, I realized that there were some things that happened that weren’t supported in the new world in which this story takes place. So I wrote out questions and brainstormed answers.

With those new answers in mind, I felt a little uncertain about the timeline of the first half of the story, so I decided it might be a good time to talk to the 2 leads in this section of the book. I didn’t go into this character interview with specific questions, like I normally do, but the discussion so far has cleared up some questions I didn’t even know I had, which is what I suspected would happen. I will continue the interview tomorrow.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 26, 2019

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Words/Time: 37 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

In many ways, as I realized today, I have been already working on the outline for this book. It started with just listing thoughts for each of the 4 main characters that were going to be in the book, but I wrote out those notes in a very similar format to how I usually write my outlines. So now it’s a matter of putting them into Scrivener, scene by scene.

Actually, I realized at the end of my time today that before I do that, I need to go back to the original writing of “Unexpectedly” and figure out what of that story is worth keeping and what isn’t helpful to this book.

See, originally, this story was written as fanfiction for an MMORPG I used to play called Ragnarok Online. It was one of the last stories I was working on when I decided to stop writing fanfiction and either write something original or stop writing. It was the only story I never finished in that format. It was basically pure romance.

The secondary main character in that story will be one of the 4 main characters in the new book. And the focus is on the lives of all 4 people, who are all involved in a small-scale civil war. So his story will only be (approximately) 1/4 of the entire thing. Add to that the fact that the original version was told mostly from the PoV of his romantic partner, and a lot of the original story is going to be extemporaneous. So tomorrow, I need to go through the original story and decide what to keep and what to cut.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 25, 2019

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Words/Time: 46 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

The structure I’m tentatively going with for this story is that there are 4 characters whose lives will be shown, mostly before and leading up to the war that they are all involved in, and a little after. Two of these characters are on the “good guys” side, and two are on the “bad guys” side.

I truly thought that I would have a lot more story for the good guys than for the bad guys, and wasn’t sure if that was okay or not. But I have so far written out the very broad plot points for 3 of the 4 characters, one of the being one of the bad guys, and so far, I have more written down for one of the bad guys than the 2 good guys. I have to keep in mind, though, that one of the good guys’ notes may be deceptively short, because I know his story better than the others already, so I don’t think I wrote as much detail for his, because I figured I knew it all already.

Either way, I’m pleased with the ideas I’ve come up with for the bad guys, and tomorrow will try to finish my notes for the 4th bad guy (the leader of all of the bad guys, in fact). Though she’s one of my oldest characters, her life outside of how she villainizes some of my main characters is very shallow. So it will take some work to come up with just the right story for her.

I also still need to figure out how I want to structure this story. I know I don’t want to just tell the entire story of 1 person, then the entire story of another, etc. But how do I intermix them? I don’t have any clue yet.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 24, 2019

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Words/Time: 50 minutes mostly doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly,” after finishing some free writing I started yesterday.

On Friday, I finished #1 in my current list of writing goals. After taking a day to do some free writing before going on to #2, I dove right in today.

1. Outline “Outcast”

2. Outline “Unexpectedly” – I have a lot less of a plot in mind for this story, but I think it will be easier to outline than Outcast, because there’s not as much there to start with—not as much that needs broken down and rebuilt. While considering where this book could go, I’ve already hit on some new ideas that I’m really excited about.

3. Re-outline “The Seeger Book”

4. Re-outline “Vin”

5. Re-outline “Protector”

I am not 100% certain about the plot for “Unexpectedly,” but I do have some solid ideas. I just don’t know what the structure will be like, or if a couple of sub-plots are strong enough. I have to sort through the ideas before starting the actual outline.

My work on this today involved first outlining what will likely become the main plot, which is a plot line I’ve had planned for a long time, and have partially wrote. Then I went on to the largest sub-plot, writing out thoughts about what should be included and how. This involved research into what term would most likely make sense for a character to call his great-grandfather, that would be a twisting of a real term in use today, in this region of the world. I’m actually really surprised I came up with something, considering how obscure my preference seemed to be.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 23, 2019

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Words/Time: 33 minutes free writing.

I read a prompt on another blog last week that had me thinking all week about what I would write for it. Not surprisingly, it was romance-related, which seems to get my creative juices flowing more than anything else these days. After cycling through my most main characters in my books, I landed on using my newest main characters, from “Protector,” for the prompt. I spent some time writing that today (and also going back through a few parts of “Protector” and its outline to help me remember a few details).

Because I finished a task on my writing goals list yesterday, I thought today would be a good day to stop and write this down while I was thinking about it. I really need to do more free writing anyway. It’s not finished, though, and I need to go to bed early to get up early, so I’ll work on it more tomorrow and, time willing, also start on a new goal.