Category: Fast Draft

So fast draft hasn’t been so fast.

Usually a personal and difficult challenge does the trick for me, but this time, I just can’t get my motivation in gear.  It’s like I’m stuck in neutral.  I have a lot on my plate at the Evil Day Job, and still can’t park in the garage because of the stuff I haven’t unpacked.  All my brain cells are depleted by the time I get my Word file open.  Dark & Early has been a bust — I’m just zonked in the morning.

On the bright side, I have my “twelve rules” figured out for the most part.  I need one more “big bang” rule that ties everything together, and a few more characterization details that I hope will come out in fleshing the draft.  Even if I can finish a first draft by July 31st, I’m not going to get it edited and polished.  I’ll just see what I can do.  Worst case, I may have a nice story to give away on the website this Christmas. 

Yesterday was a pretty good start to Fast Draft; today, not so much.

That Man had to be up at 4:15 yesterday to make a long drive to KS, so I got up too.  I made 2K in the morning before work on the new story, which was exactly my goal.  Considering I didn’t have any real plotting done yet and only a vague idea of what I wanted to happen, I was pleased.

Over lunch, I read project #1 (first draft finished Sunday) to make sure it didn’t suck, and to my relief, I think it’s a pretty good story.  Needs more work, though — I’ve got a few plot things I want to amp up, tie together, etc.

While cooking dinner, I began plotting more on project #2.  I wrote out note cards for the scenes I did this morning and roughed out the next few scenes as well.  Like Dear Sir, I’m Yours had letters that tied the plot and character together, this story has a little element that I want to start each chapter off with.  The heroine is an attorney and has a list of rules that she never breaks, else disaster results.  She broke one right before the story opens, and now she’s dealing with the fallout and forced to call on someone who really messes up her careful ordered existence.

The hero, of course.  

Ideally, since this is a Christmas-themed novella, I’d be tickled to end up with 12 rules, and thus 12 chapters to handle those rules, but we’ll see.  I wrote up a little backstory for each character, but I’m still missing the characters’ static traits.  Since those have to be set early and shown repeatedly, I already know that’s going to be a revision item I need to allow time for.  I have the theme and the metaphor for that theme, so that’s good.  Just need those crucial static traits.

Of course, I went to bed very early last night to enable another Dark & Early session this morning, but the phone rang off the hook and then I couldn’t sleep.  So I’m starting off seriously behind today.  Somehow, somewhere, I need to find time to get 2K new words and brainstorm static traits!!

Any little Christmas, dating rules, or attorney jokes you want to share?  Pithy little sayings that will be fun for the hero to use against my heroine.  Stuff like “Love isn’t worth getting sued over,” or “People lie — the law never does.”