Writing in Public, Too: NaNoWriMo Day 23

I only got in another hundred words today on the Arthur story.
I hit a snag after that. I\’m rather out of outline. Long term, I have some great ideas about where the story is going to go. But I was having a terrible time working out where I wanted it to get in the short term – like this one next episode, and the one after. So I decided to take a couple of days off, and work on something different.

I stalked through old projects, and came across one which I liked. It\’s about a character named Raven (no last name yet) who lives in the same universe as Ryan Blackwell (from the Blackwell Magic series – By Darkness Revealed and Ashes Ascendant). The world is one where magic exists, and nasty creatures of magic exist, but they stick to the shadows – and most people don\’t know about them. Ryan has magic of his own, and uses it to defend himself and others.

Raven doesn\’t have any magic. She\’s a doctor. She\’s pretty much a normal person, who is smacked in the face with the reality of the world through an accident of fate. The rest of the story is about what she does after she learns that everything she thought she knew about magic and monsters was wrong.

It\’s a cool storyline, and I had plans for a big serial. I never got far, and reading the manuscript over today, I saw why. It was written in third person, but that\’s too distant for this sort of story. I want to be in the character\’s head. After reading it, I could see how the distance was hurting the story. Intuitively, I stepped away after writing the first couple thousand words – I knew something was wrong, back then, but didn\’t know what.

So today, I took the story and started working on it again. Actually, I *redrafted* it, from start to finish, a total rewrite in first person. Now the reader sits squarely inside Raven\’s head while she tells her story. I like the new version much more.

Between the reading, and the analyzing, I ate up a good chunk of my day. After that was done I got into the rewrite. Got about 2000 words in before calling it quits for the day.

Fiction words for the day: 2100      Fiction words for November: 32,000 (200 words into 5th Arthur, 2000 words done on Raven)

Blog Words today: 407    Blog Words for November: 9409