Today, as those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen, I wrote my way into a massive conflict between Story & Outline. Decided to give them pistols at 10 paragraphs, and let them sort it out.
Much to my surprise, that worked.
Or rather, what worked was, I looked at History and said “History, I seem to have goofed. Story as she’s written is good. But outline is also really good, and will get me to my end destination. What can you give me, to help get these two back together?”
And History reached into her bag of tricks and said, “well, I have this town over here that was around 30 years later than your time period, but oh hey, in my pocket here I have an actual reason why that town could easily have existed even 50 years earlier, based on your divergent history. Will that do?”
And then, because I thanked her nicely, she tapped me on the shoulder half an hour later and said “and I found this character, too. Can you use him?”
Why yes, yes I could.
Which is the roundabout way of saying that the 2500 words I wrote today felt more like 4000. Because there was a lot of negotiation going on.
Also: writing is physical work. I is sore and in dire need of a massage. When I hit Rough Draft 0, there is a deep tissue massage with my name on it…
And god, I really want to talk about this book, and this world, but I don’t even know what to say, or what i can say, or how annoyed people will be if I babble about a book you’re not going to be able to read for another year….?
(I’ve been giving away snippets over on Tumblr, as an outlet, but I barely have a hundred followers over there, so sometimes it feels like whispering into the void…)