Life After NaNoWriMo
Posted 06 Dec 2016
drafting editing
I've had a really hard time focusing, or at least slipping into the creative brain state while writing, since I finished draft 1 of Salvage on November 25.
There've been a lot of administrative tasks in my to-do list, and I have been hassled by emergency website issues for myself and clients (and my day job). In addition, it's holiday season and there are lots of holiday plans and shopping and budgeting to fill my brain.
Unfortunately it seems my creativity is the most buoyant item in my brain, so when my cup overflows, over goes my ability to sit down and free-write some delicious prose.
So Salvage, right now, is with my developmental editor for a read-through, and we'll meet via Skype on Sunday morning to start to strip that apart. So in the meantime I'm returning to my Phantom Traveler project, with the plan to start posting Patreon content in the new year.
Returning to Ehl'i's life after a month off, I found I had some issues with a few of the pseudo-scientific details of her inciting situation. Sunday morning I realized this during my Asimov Hour and realized I needed to unravel the threads a bit before continuing, so the whole fabric of the story will be stronger later on.
Yesterday morning I struggled to pinpoint her physiology, a fairly large detail of the character. I wanted it to have a bit of sense and purpose, rather than just a neat physical feature that made her look interesting and nothing else. I got halfway there, and did more research this morning to pin down the inspiring zoological species.
Now that's pretty much set in stone, and I really hope the next time I sit down to work on her stories, things flow a bit better. There are still two documents to go back in and adjust details on, but I've done the majority of those detail revisions, and probably within tomorrow's Asimov Hour I'll be able to move forward with her story.
Maybe in Thursday's post, if I haven't had a chance to do a prompted creative writing exercise, I'll post a little teaser about Ehl'i's world.