All Sorts of Stuff

It's been an eventful week.

The other day I learned that one of my online acquaintance passed away unexpectedly. I didn't know her, only her name, her avatar and her writings, but she once encouraged me to keep trying when I was ready to throw in the towel and walk away.

Just that little contact, those kind words when they were needed, make me wish I had known her better. If you're curious or interested, the name under which she was published was J.L Fontaine. She wrote 'The Mark' available from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mark-J-L-Fontaine/dp/1909374369

All across the writer's site I've joined to supplant Authonomy, which "died" the same day Judith did, people are writing beautiful things, poems and memories. It's touching and makes my regret that I didn't know her better, that much deeper.

Moving forward with my life, which I must and will, I have committed to NaNoWriMo. I signed up last night and will spend time in the next couple of weeks familiarizing myself with the site and the process. I am looking forward to it, even though I feel very hemmed in by life just now, without the room to breathe freely enough to write freely.

This might not be all bad, though, because I started throwing something out yesterday, a change in course to 'In A Green & Shady Place' to spice it up and get away from bland. I just tossed words down and did some minimal rearranging, then I came to work.

When I looked at it again this morning, after a twenty-four hour rest, I said (yes - out loud) 'that's pretty good stuff!'. It was so good, in fact, that I moved it down to where I might be able to use it. It's that strong.

This is one of the challenges I find in writing. I'll start with something and it takes on a life of its own. Then I'll think about it, what can I do to switch it up, make it more interesting / exciting, and I'll play with it. If that's better than what I had, I'll keep it and work from there. The hard part is when I have a complete story and do the thinking / switching / changing. This time is another case where I thought of a switch, got it on "paper", then decided to go most of the way back to what I had because what will come next would have gone away, otherwise, and I like what comes next.

So I'm back to mending the loose ends together, to make the seam seamless and hide it from plain view. That's the hard part and will probably take a couple of iterations. It usually does, and it might lead to other changes, but that would come later.

What's a bit concerning, right now, is with the momentum I have with this story, the idea of setting it down and working on something brand new for NaNo is a little intimidating. I do, however, have the outline started. I need to fill in and flesh out a bit, to get a full story of 50,000 words, but I have a little time.

Perhaps I'll be able to wring a few extra hours out of someplace, and be able to work on both simultaneously. Particularly since I will be serializing the story here. Very rough first draft, but it might be interesting to see how the story evolves and changes through the creative process.

In the meantime, I hope you have a lovely day, that it's just as much or as little as you like.

Best~
Philippa

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