Writing

The award-winning-based-on-the-first-twenty-pages fantasy romance has crossed the 60,000-word line. I was feeling fairly productive until I got to another “they need to get from Point A to Point B” scene and came to a screeching halt for a week. I’m frequently derailed by that type of scene, and it usually turns out in revision that

It’s been over a month since the last update and I’m only halfway to the next 10K milestone because life is bad and suffering actually is not conducive to creativity because it sucks up all your mental energy, so this will be short. I finished the “Wanna see something that will give you nightmares?” scene,

Amidst the distractions and technical disasters (nope, still not fully fixed), I finally limped past the 40,000-word mark on the fantasy romance, which encompassed the “Inexplicable Anger That Somebody I DON’T EVEN LIKE Could Have DIED” scene, with a side of “I Saved Your Miserable Life So Now We’re Even/Actually I Only Got In Your

I’m just shy of 40,000 words on the fantasy romance, so—predictably—the wind machine filling my sails has been switched off. This always happens around this point of writing mass, where it becomes clear I’ve put a lot of time and labor into a project and finally have something substantial to show for it. You’d think

Many, many years ago, I decided I wanted to write a story about a woman who had been, basically, an urban fantasy heroine before being forced into retirement by an injury that impeded her ability to kick ass. During the years of her ass-kicking career, she was too busy saving the world and trying to

About two weeks ago, I realized the impracticality of hauling gold over a mountain (on foot) to a counterfeiter. Jewels are more easily portable, so I changed my pilfering from gold to jewels and my sooty-armed blacksmith/counterfeiter to an embroidered waistcoat-wearing jewel fence. Yesterday, as I got into writing the road trip toward exchanging the

I cannot overemphasize how meaningless word count is at this stage of this project. Ordinarily, due to my aversion to complete sentences during rough drafts, doubling the rough-draft word count is a fairly accurate reflection of the finished product, and I can juggle the numbers for rough and projected and anticipated length and know that

Since I last noted my progress here, I’ve gotten a few scenes into Act II. Act I pushes a protagonist to go on a journey. Act II begins when the protagonist says, “FINE! I’LL GO ON YOUR STUPID JOURNEY!” (I wrote a bare bones 3-act structure post in the distant past with a little more

A minor theme in the original plan for this story was “heroes are chumps.” The example the heroine used to argue this point was executed as the reward for all his good deeds. I saved the world, and all I got was this lousy pyre. Well, a lot has changed since the original plan! (A