Be Mean!

After all the preaching I’ve done about conflict, what do I do?

I play nice.

My story was going absolutely nowhere. Why?

NO CONFLICT!

No more. My sweet little heroine just threw up in her uncle’s 1969 Jaguar E-Type Roadster.

I never saw it coming till it sort of ran through my head and my fingers and onto the draft. Now it's running all over his leather seats. Ewwwwwww

Now he has all the more reason to hate the fact that his sister has dumped her daughter on his doorstep and hasn’t even had the courtesy to explain why.

This has been my problem all along! I knew that Sadie and Herbert were very different people, but I wasn’t ready to let Herbert be downright mean to her. And I wanted Sadie to win over the world, and she'll do that with most of the characters, but Uncle Herbie is going to take a little time. 50,000 words worth of time. I still want in the end for them to come to some kind of mutual understanding and respect, but I was working that in way too soon and everything was falling flat. The only exciting parts were the six key scenes I’d figured out to serve as markers.

Plus I’ve jotted ideas down in too many places. (Where have I heard this before???) Including a napkin at Chili’s that I left there on the table at lunch today. Arg! I’m trying to figure out a novel builder program (freebies: yWriter2) because I think it has all the features I’d need to jot these notes and do drafts, move scenes, etc., all in one place. It looks like it would come in even more handy in the revision phase than the draft. So I have notes there in that program (that I'm hoping I can find again), notes in a NaNo file in my writing file, and then one of these nights when I was bleary-eyed and tired of clicking so many times, I put the NaNo file on the desktop where I promptly forgot it was there. So now I have two NaNo files and I’m afraid of trying to coordinate them + yWriter2. Sometimes I think I really should go back to a pen and notebook.

All in all a pretty good day.

I told ds#2 today that I’m scheduling next Thursday as a marathon day. We’ll see. There are all kinds of relatives coming the following week, and there’s no telling how much time I’ll lose then.

Feeling much better about this today. I was pretty discouraged yesterday when I sat down to write and couldn’t stay awake. It was partly the hour and partly the day, but mostly my story was so DULL!!!!

I promised myself I'm writing to Plot Point 1 before I look any farther ahead, because I really don't have a clue what could happen past that point to keep the tension up. But today's discovery process was thrilling. I know there will be more of them out there if I just push on.

Go NaNo!