Day 98

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

13 May 2016

I’m mildly irritated at how I’m missing all the nice round numbers in the final push here. Just passed 50 chapters, with two to go. Sitting on Day 98 of writing with only one more day left in the first draft. Wouldn’t that have been nice; an evenly divisible 50 chapters in 100 days and (it won’t quite be) 100,000 words? Simple math; an average of 2,000 words per chapter at a rate of 1,000 words per day. Estimating would (will be) a dream.

Thankfully, we have discovered the wonders of rounding, so I’ll just memorize my nice, round numbers, thanks muchly, and pretend they’re real.

Zippy, shortish chapters last week moving things along clear as mud when it comes to Sam and Maria, who kinda sound like a couple, but totally aren’t. Still teasing big reveals, which as we hit the penultimate chapter is a naughty move, I know. It might be my fear of wrapping it all up, but there’s really not a heck of a lot of explanation or development by the end of this first book, which is going to raise the pressure for the next one (ugh.) But there was no way I was going to be able to wrap it up in a reasonable length/timeline with just one book. Self-indulgent and lazy, perhaps, but I’m planning to gamble that there are some who will appreciate this long-winded tale…

It’s looking more like a Teen Supernatural Thriller than YA Adventure or juvenile horror… minus all the excitement, blood and terror that it needs to really work, lol. But it sounds better than ‘emo girl is so stuck in her head she doesn’t realize she’s talking to herself’ - snappier. There’s some chance that the rewrites will up the action and tighten up the pacing with more careful hints and paced reveals… some chance, but not a lot, lol.

So here we are; the final day of uninterrupted, solitary work, before I have to get more aggressive about protecting my space. And here we are at the end of Cole’s story (for now) - the grand emotional climax, the big reveal, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… ugh. Hang on, I need another drink…

So, there’s this thing where I read a lot of Teen/YA fiction, which often has a action/horror/SF/fantasy/supernatural hook, but which is mostly a vehicle for romance. Which isn’t something I’d have admitted (to myself or anyone else) a decade ago, but which I’m getting more ok with - it’s just another type of escapist fantasy, after all. But owning up to writing that sort of thing, and actually writing it out, terrifies, embarrasses, and pretty thoroughly paralyzes me. Like, I’d respect myself more if I could write technically and politically complex SF or emotionally-raw realism or something, but instead I’m playing in the drippy romance sandbox. And the crazy thing is, I actually have a somewhat intellectually-defensible reason for being there - all meaning, all stories hinge on human relationships; they’re what makes any and all of it matter. And the romances, little crushes to grand, tragic epics, are what motivate, distract and define everyone in everything, even when they’re going about the rest of life. Because, present dating crises aside, mostly people want to be with other people and mostly they get married and either stay married, or go looking for someone else. So all the girls watch the boys, and all the boys watch the girls, and even when nothing much comes of it, it still goes on.

And so Cole is distracted and lured by Ravel, and Itri goes searching for Cole, and in another universe, Edana forgets herself when she meets Torchan, and Torchan gives up his world for Edana, and a little girl named Nia is tempted by the false promise, the merest hint of affection, and then follows a boy into another world. Because we all give up our worlds for the promise of the new ones that another human soul inhabits. And even when we have to make our own, we’re always waiting for the chance to slip through the gateway and find ourselves in that magical foreign world.

Friday

Start time: 12:15 am

Location: couch/living room

Drinking: Bowmore Islay Scotch

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