I’ve now written 24,000 words, give or take a hundred, in four weeks.
I feel the arc of the book bending to a close, though there’s still a lot of scenes to write. I’m not a tight outliner; I keep a flow chart and notes, but I try to give the characters free rein if they want to take another path.
We’ve turned the wheel of the year past winter solstice. Today is a brilliantly sunny day: time out of time, definitely a December day and yet all sun.
I wrote another 6,000 words this week. If that’s pretty much all I do, besides eat, sleep, and work my day job, I can hit my marks. At least, I have so far.
I did go to one holiday party. Don’t tell the writing gods I played hookey…
This upcoming month is a make-it-or-break-it writing period. I have about 30,000 words to write to finish a draft of the second book, to meet the timeline I agreed on with my publisher.
For the last three weeks, I had to hold off daily writing, first for the retreat, then for deadlines at the day job.
But now I’m diving in again. Wish me luck.
I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.
There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.
But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.
Hekate was said to have saved Byzantium from Philip of Macedon by showing the Byzantines a great light in the sky, so they erected a statue of Hekate Lampadephoros, Hekate Light-Bringer.