It’s a beautiful day

Awesome weather today, sunny and mild.  We spent the morning running errands,  going to the Farmer’s Market in town, and looking for Christmas presents.  Usually by this time of year I am done with my shopping, but this year, thanks to my publication schedule I haven’t even started yet!  Not that I am complaining.  I’ll just have to do a couple of marathon days sometime soon.

My name is up on the Mushroom website as one of their authors, although if you click on  me you get a 404 error. 😦  Hopefully that will change sometime in the next few days.

I did some new words today,  chapter 2 of “Beyond the Gyre.”  I was trying to write a conversation (well more like an argument) between ten people all in the same room.  It was pretty difficult and I am not sure how successfully it turned out.  I’ll have to read what I wrote tomorrow and see what I think then.

I may, perhaps, sign up for an intensive screenwriting seminar to be held at the University of Otago at the end of January.  I know little about writing for movies and television, and I don’t have any plans to do so, but I thought it might help me with dialogue and pacing and scene setting, within the framework of a novel.

Has anyone done any screenwriting?  Is it a subject in which it would be worth trying to acquire some skills?  This class is expensive, so I don’t want to do it unless it will be beneficial to me somehow.

 

It has begun.

Yesterday afternoon I decided that the procrastination had gone on long enough.  I started on Beyond the Gyre.  Managed to get four pages written before I had to cook dinner.  This book takes place fifteen years after the closing events of Birth of the Dawnmaid.  Characters that were merely babies and children are now the protagonists/antagonists and the parents, who were the main characters in the last book have joined the second tier.  Sort of like real life actually.

It will take me a little while to get into the heads of these new characters.  I have to think, alot, about how they will speak and move and behave generally.  Even though I know how the story will develop, in general terms.  I don’t do a huge amount in the way of outlining before I start.  Just a sketchy chapter by chapter synopsis.  It often changes as I am writing–new ideas occur to me, or things I believed would work just don’t for whatever reason.

I work quite linearly.  That is the best thing for me, but I know other writers who start in the middle and work backwards and forwards.

I have a long way to go, but it is something just to have started.