A good day

After wading through sludge on Tuesday, yesterday's writing went much smoother. Finally got the characters in the current scene to get things moving and happening, which meant things started flowing as I wrote. Was quite surprised when I stopped to discover that I'd done 1500 words, as I thought it was just over 1000, and that last 500 or so had just flowed out so quickly and easily that it felt like a lot less.

Total so far is 34,742, which means that barring a disaster today, I should hit the 35,000 target for the work in progress pretty easily. Now I'm out of the sludge I should have a decent day today, as I've got a good idea how this chapter finishes and how the next one starts, which should help things flow. Anyway, I need to get back ahead of schedule and rebuild the buffer zone, as I might not get much of a chance to write at the weekend, as I could be busy on both Saturday and Sunday.

Another old short story is pushing into my head too - one I started but wasn't too keen on the way I was telling it. There's a nice little romance in there, but I need to work out how to get to the meat of the story rather than the build-up. Once that clicks, though, the rest of the story comes alive in my head. What I might do is just plough on with it from where I was, then go back and redo the beginning. That approach worked quite well for When There's An R In The Month - the original opening didn't work, but once I'd written the scenes with Rose and Shauna together, I had a much better idea of their characters to go back and redo the start. (And it's the same with the work in progress as well - now I know how the characters work together, their original meeting has changed in my head)

It does feel odd, sometimes, changing character's histories in the light of later developments, but that's part of the fun of revision - you get to hack away the false tales you've told of these people in order to get to the truth about them. In a way, that's a sign of properly rounded and interesting characters - they surprise you by having stories that weren't what you expected when you began writing them.