Day 16, 2019

This morning I hit a bump in the road. There were several moments where I thought, “What am I going to do now?”

In real life, I would wander around the house moaning and groaning and complaining and whispering to myself and talking to God and eating delicious foods and cleaning rooms that haven’t been cleaned in weeks and dusting and whining and saying, Why do I write books?

But who has that kind of time now? I needed to get 2000-ish words done in less than two hours.

I know what I want to happen in the book, but I feel like I’m weaving something together without quite seeing the pattern. I’m not quite sure HOW I’m going to get to an integral part of the story. I can’t leave this out. It ties into the climax. So this is important.

Once I saw this great photo of a writer sitting in her chair with her feet up on her desk, arms folded across her chest, eyes closed. The caption read, Working. I love that picture. It’s just so true for writers. For just about anyone, I believe.

Thinking is an important part of writing. Even during NaNo.

The writer must get from point A to point B in a way that makes sense to the story. I don’t know the number of times I’ve said to someone about their manuscripts, “That would never happen.”

“But it has to,” the writer says.

“Then prove to me why it must happen just this way.”

This morning I took a few moments to think about the problem that I must sew into the fabric in just right way.

And something else came to me as I closed my eyes and wondered. The idea that less is more. I don’t have to write out every twist of the fabric, or the way the needle pulls the thread through the cloth. Not in this part of the story. When the time comes, when I need to slow the story down just a little for facts to sink in, when it’s important, then I can give that much detail.

And so my alien is doing a simple thing to get me closer to what needs to happen with her best friend. She’s leaving a note of a vampire’s coffin.

Why not?

I love notes!