Week 1

Free of "The Hidden" by way of a kindly beta reader, I began posting "Becoming" for critique.  Written as a NaNo novel one November, "Becoming" has a lot of promise, and I know just where it went wrong--written in haste, I left out a lot of the background that made the world as interesting to me as the characters.  Unfortunately, I discovered that this was not the only way I screwed up.  Aware of how many times computer crashes have wiped out my work, I saved it on both a hard and a flash drive...I thought.  You know how when you "save as", a file will continue to save that way until you do it again?  I forgot. 

Yeah, that sucked. 

With most of the story lost, I didn't have the heart to pick right up.  I decided to work on another old story that has (for me a least) enjoyable characters amid a mess of plot.  A zillion years ago, I played in an online story (shout out to Phoenix by Night!) with great potential for novel translation.  I've explored it a little bit, recreating the characters since I technically only had the right to my own, fleshing out her story...and setting it down because her story was too interwoven with the other characters and the game's storyteller had pretty much just ripped off Clive Barker.

Still, Wade persists as one of my favorite characters.  So...

DAY ONE-- I decided that I would, indeed, write Wade's story.
DAY TWO-- I got a notebook and started writing down everything I know about Wade.  Decided to do the same for the other characters and the setting...and didn't.
"I didn't" pretty much covers the rest of the week.  I revised an English paper, completed by Pre-1877 assignments, and still failed to catch up to my 1960s reading, but I didn't do any work on the story.

I did decide to blog about it.  I need to get a clear view of what works for me and what doesn't.  And you, dear few gentle readers, might be able to say, "Wow, look how An crashed and burned.  I can think of a better way to get my novel written."