Okay, so things didn't go so well last night. I got myself up to around 4,000 words before kicking off for the night, but I would have liked to have been closer to 5,000. And here it is just after midnight a day later and I've only closed in on 5,000 now. Not terrible, right? I mean, I'm less than 100 words off quota. Except that I had hoped to be far ahead of quota during the "honeymoon" period.
The problem is this: I've gotten Walt (my main character) sitting at a dinner with a family . . . and for most of a day I wasn't sure what they were going to talk about. So I had this primo writing time after I got Zuzu to sleep and before Laura and Piper came back from the 3-D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas when I could have cranked out major words. And I ended up writing "around" my story. Biding my time.
It wasn't until Piper was asleep, Laura was by my side, and we watched an episode of Pushing Daisies that I figured out the two things that would go on at this dinner: 1) Walt's buddy's wife will press him on his history, which he will be typically reluctant to share; and 2) The seeds will be sown for an adulterous relationship between said wife and Walt.
This latter item took me quite by surprise, and may be the first sign of what Chris Baty and many others have talked about in the past: characters deciding to do things "on their own," without your necessarily willing it. Since I immediately created this female character as someone who did not sign up for the conservative Christian marriage she has found herself in, it would make sense that she is profoundly unhappy . . . and that Walt's appearance in their household makes possible a dalliance that she was likely to be doing someday soon anyway.
I had found myself resisting working sex into the story, thinking that was just "too easy" to go there. But that's just silly. An affair can be handled in very adult (read: grown-up) ways. I can keep titillation to a minimum — with the full knowledge that the very word affair carries a pretty high titillation factor.
I'm going to have a couple of hours tomorrow at a local café to pound out some words. Hopefully I can make some gains on my word count then.
2 comments:
GO MARCK!!!!!!!
your Canado-LosAngelean cheerleading leader!
omg you are writing all this, AND the novel? plus going to events and lunches and cafes? well.
I shampooed the carpet and made chili yesterday after work. So there.
"she wandered in aimlessly off the block, through link at the nano site, where she was last heard mumbling something about wanting her toasted-cheese but it's not there"
~~fmwrites
yes I'm writing, I'm writing already!
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