Yep, there's the start of the novel, in all its eensy glory. It's a bit more than I thought I'd write - there was a moment last night, right after the first 800 words, when I sat in my chair for a good hour, without a single clue as to what to write next. I thought, ok, well, that was a fluke - guess I'll never be able to write another novel again, so time for Solitaire! And then at some point I realized my fingers were moving over the keyboard, and they weren't just typing crazy stuff like all work and no play makes Homer… Yeah, so. I've no doubt that there will be many more moments of blind panic, but that's what makes novel writing so much fun - the panic and the pants-wetting!

I'm not posting an excerpt yet, because I'm still tinkering with characters and setting - a lot of what I wrote will be edited tonight, although it won't be major rewriting. I just want to reword a few things. I'm not thinking about the fact that everything I'm working on now may be thrown out in a later draft. That's kind of par for the course. I think I should also start separate character documents, with vital statistics on the protagonists and supporting cast. And: I'm going to start going back over my Clarion notes, specifically over what Michael Swanwick and Nancy Kress had to say about plotting and the structure of character conflicts/arcs. I know it seems a bit odd to be doing this after I've started writing, rather than before. However, it wasn't until I wrote last night's little bit that I had any real sense of how much more there might be to the novel than what I'd initially imagined. But after writing just a few paragraphs, I was "oh, it's also about that - of course". In other words: this is still a novel about unfulfilled love between straight women and gay men, but now it's also a novel about taking the place of the other, of usurping, of the young generation battling the prior one, of power struggles between innocence and experience. In other words, it's about mothers versus daughters. lol.

Now that I think about it, I think that hour of "doing nothing" was where my subconscious was moving from "the story is about this" to "the story is about this and this and layers of this". Sometimes it takes a while to take the new possibilities in, to incorporate them into your body and mind. That's why I can't truly be upset or chide myself for "spacing out" or panicking over supposedly nothing. It's like the death throws of the old thought processes, as new ones take control.

Labels: "the ruins of love"