NaNo Day Nine

A pox on Blogger.... Sorry about the late post, but Blogger was having some sort of issues this morning!

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. - Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions for titles of my hero's comic strip. The protagonist of the strip is now named Flap (thanks to Anno) and the title of the strip is Generation Quest (thanks to Allie for all her "Generation" suggestions).

Speaking of Allie, she just had a story accepted at Virtual Tales. Go send her a hearty "congratulations"! (Speaking of congrats… two days ago, en route to the library, I saw a sign at a local business that read, in part: CONGRADULATIONS! -- ARGH!).

So, Chris Baty sent me an email this morning. Oh, I'm sure he sent it to a few (or 70,000) other people, but it was mostly for me.

He talked about the Week Two wall, when your inner editor returns from vacation (why, oh why won't she stay away for the entire four weeks? I paid for the hotel and everything!), when you realize the enormity of your challenge, when you wonder why you thought you could write something interesting in a month.

Last night, I figured out one of my big problems. I'm writing: this happened and then this and this.

Instead, I should be writing: This happened and it made them feel this way and caused this problem/result. And then this happened and they felt this way….

I found that I had been dancing around the edges of things; brushing up against issues that would deepen the conflict instead of leaping in with both feet. I went back and read through the nearly seventy pages I have written and changed that in several places. It still isn't perfect, but it's better and it makes me like the story better.

Still, I need more conflict. I need something to come and smack the characters upside the head or to blow up in their faces. I guess I'll just keep writing and see what happens. I'm still slightly ahead of schedule, so if I hang in and make at least 1667 words a day, I should be golden.

Here goes nothing.

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So far this morning, despite having company at 5 a.m., I managed another 573 words.

I now have a grand total of: 15,575 / 50,000