And thenI forgot to write and blog again.

Still well ahead of my stated goals on both, and with my blog posts going unremarked a couple days' off really doesn't matter -- but I am annoyed at myself for letting a day pass, however busy, without achieving my wordcount.   The idea is to make it an everyday, unremarkable thing -- I'm still boggled by not just the amount I've achieved in the last month's writing, but by how easy it was to do with just a few hours to set aside each day, and no guarantee I could use the computer for all of it (Megan and I share her laptop).  If I have a computer of my own at some point, and can truly treat writing like an 8-hour-a-day job, I can really do this on a commercial scale (which is, for mid-listers and below, roughly 3 novels a year -- between 150,000 and 300,000 words, MINIMUM.  By comparison my goal for this year, at 250 words/day, is 91,250 words for the year.  And at my average word count so far, I'll actually reach about 140k if I can sustain it).

Today's project, beyond the bare minimum of getting in 250 words for today and 250 words for yesterday, is to fill in 2 missing scenes in Chapter 10 of Hellion Prince.  Once I patch those holes, I'll have about 50-60% of the chapter done.  I want to do more work on Night Class as well, but while I know the shape of the story pretty precisely, I am baffled about how to get from my introduction into the meat of the action.  I should talk it out with someone -- speaking out loud to a person, even if they give no feedback, has always helped me more than working in a vaccuum, outlining and jotting notes, or even speaking out loud to myself.  Something about how the human brain processes thoughts in social situations, maybe, but whatever it is it works.  When something works for me in writing I am just superstitious enough to feel weird about examining it closely rather than sitting back and letting the mystery work its magic.  Not to say I don't do a lot of very deliberate work on structure and craft in the writing itself, but in the macro sense, what gets me thinking and working in the first place.

It's also interesting for me to consider (and hopefully for you to hear me considering?) how every story brings its own set of problems.  In Running In Her Veins, with a few notable exceptions, I wrote linearly -- I started at Chapter One (I reworked chapter one for three to four years before I gave up fiddling with it and pushed on!) and went in order.  Jordan and Aaron arriving at Rose's apartment was written early, and so was Jordan and Casimir at the embankment (that was almost the very first thing I wrote, and while I edited the HELL out of it, the basics of scene and dialogue remained the same).  Apart from that, everything was strictly written in the same order it was presented in the text.  I never outlined, but I knew all the basic steps of the story from the start -- maybe 66% of the whole book, with the remaining 33% being transitional scenes and flesh on the bones.  I didn't know about David's phone call, or Hylas in the graveyard, or HOW Jordan would get in to the Order's compound.  But I knew about Jordan and Casimir talking on the airplane, and I knew about Ben's forced clairvoyance spell, and I knew every detail of the swordfight with Timothy and Lucien in the subway station, and every step of the choreography in the climax, years before they occurred.

The Hellion Prince is a lot different.  I have outlined again and again, and discarded outline after outline.  I know the characters and the world much more fully beforehand, where in RIHV I discovered them as I went along.  I know the major plot points, and the basic timeline.  And whenever I've gotten stuck I've written a random scene from somewhere else in the story, a patch in the quilt, and learned from it about what necessarily must come before and after to connect it to the parts that I know.  But it's still like that now, a puzzle with a few connected islands of pieces and great swathes of emptiness.  I know the shape of the story, but there are only three or four specific scenes I know about that I haven't yet committed to paper (and I can't tell you what they are, because every one is HUGE and critical -- two duels, one with spells and one with swords, and I promise if you guessed who they were fought against correctly you'd be getting lucky; one death scene; and the meat of the climax).  Apart from that, I only know what I can extrapolate from the many orphaned scenes that seem to fit logically in a framework I can't fully see.  Chapter Ten and Chapter Twelve are pretty clear to me.  Chapter Eleven is a big blank, unfortunately.  Chapter Thirteen -- the first Chapter of Part II, since this book is divided by season and Chapter Twelve is Midsummer Night's Eve -- I have half of, and can therefore assume what the other half is.  But how do I get Damarhis from here, through there, to the point I know his character and his social circumstances arrive at?  I know how he develops, but I have no idea what it is that makes him develop.

I don't really know how coherently I expressed that.  And it probably sounds like I'm much more worried and lost than I actually am -- the world and the story have their logic well-mapped, and the characters themselves almost literally talk to me.  In a funny way, everything I need to do is done, because the people push forward the narrative on their own, and I just have to listen close as they tell me about it.  It just interests me that they do, when in Running In Her Veins they didn't speak at all, except to veto dumb choices on my part that would have taken them OOC.

Second book of the year.

So far, I haven't been doing nearly as much reading as I generally do -- though for comfort, or to look at tone and theme and what not to help with my own writing, I have re-read a couple dozen favorites.

Anyway, the second new book I read this year was Dreadnought, by Cherie Priest.  Sequel to Boneshaker, it addresses every one of the problems I had with the former -- the characters are active and essential in the events happening around them, sometimes overly so.  The author lets herself indulge in the urge to explore the fantastic world she's built -- but in a novel about crossing the country by rail, that makes sense and works well.  It is jam-packed with strong women, like Boneshaker, and it is deliciously atmospheric in re-framing the history, culture, and peoples of 19th-century America.  And while it helps to have read Boneshaker first, it is certainly not necessary.  Full marks, Ms. Priest.  Steampunk Zombie Civil War Train Mystery novels have seldom been cooler than this.

575 words so far today. So that's all right.

An excerpt, because I've been forgetting to post them:

“What a thing to say at a séance,” Vitiane said cheerfully from just past Damarhis' elbow, and with a great effort he avoided jumping sideways into the middle of the diagram and disturbing it. The effort was wasted a moment later, though his dignity was maintained, when she circled to stand between the two of them, wreathing herself in flickering violet lines that sputtered and faded as she touched them. It was, Damarhis thought, an appropriately dramatic way of getting every eye in the room to turn to her briefly, and smiled. Vitiane's flair for theater was easily a match for his own, and they were often one another's best audiences – easier to impress than Belasen or Ansira, and more instinctive. They couldn't orchestrate a royal audience or a scandalous party, but once there they could keep everyone present well entertained.

“This way, boys,” she said, linking arms with each of them. “You're not meant to be the center of the spectacle right now, and if you steal Ansira's thunder you'll end up struck by lightning. Besides, you won't want to miss this.”