Joely Sue Burkhart

With the weekend trip to St. Louis, it was a struggle to get much done. 

Over the past few year or so, I’ve started writing first drafts in sections that roughly match my outline.  So if I have 20 sections outlined, I end up with 20 individual files of roughly 1000 words, and usually a few additional “rough start” sections that aren’t quite right.  When I’m really rocking and rolling, I’ll do a section a day.

Since I’m obviously not rocking and rolling–I’ve been working on this novella for about two months now–I had only 7 files, each of which contained more than one section.  For whatever reason, that’s how this novella is going, so I went with the flow.  I also had a main file that I started early on, and then split out to individual sections when the writing slowed to a crawl.  While making the 3+ hour drive to and from St. Louis, I took all those sections and smoothed them together, expanding here and there, fixing MRUs, changing wording, until I have a single nice “first draft” document that’s not really a first draft at all.  It’s up to 10,500 words.

I also added another fine little layer of conflict between Zahak and his best friend, who’s pushing him to challenge his brother for position of azi. 

Then I continued my new section, which I thought was going to be a love scene.  Oops, nope, more conflict happened and Eleni cursed at him.  Ha.  So while SMF has a love scene in the opening 10 pages, I’ve managed to go 36 pages with nothing but angst in TFW.  Sigh.  At least no one will be able to accuse me of writing “cookie cutter” stories that are too formulaic.   

Trust me, when Eleni and Zahak finally get together, it’ll be nuclear meltdown.

So TFW is at 11,300 and counting (not including a dream sequence I cut earlier).  I’ll be pushing as hard as possible to finish this first draft by the end of the month.  I don’t know if I can make it, but that’s my goal.

How was your week?

P.S.  I dreamed about TFW last night, a most excellent sign.  When I can fall asleep thinking about the story, the characters, my brain will resolve all sorts of issues for me in my sleep.  If I can remember them.    My dead story file contains those stories that never sparked my imagination enough to cross into my dreams.  Needless to say, I dreamed BloodRose for YEARS, long before I even started writing it.