A first novel: Break

I took a break in writing this week. Not that I particularly deserved or needed one. I struggled to put down just over two hundred words and gave up, called it a week. Part of this was due to the appearance of Spring Break. Demetra and I spent the week at her parents', and that is not conducive to writing. There are new relatives to visit everyday and errands to run. There is also a TV with a diagonal that pushes four feet. That is a lot of distractions.

Also, I had run out of timeline. The timeline had helped my writing more than I understood. Knowing what was going to come next and only needing to fill in the details and taking the time to better understand the characters within the situations made it all come so smooth that when I ran out of timeline, it jarred hard. I don't even know how to finish this final scene before they leave for Nairobi. This break week has been an opportunity to develop that as well.

With any luck now and without any further breaks, I should have this earliest draft done by the summer, and there will be a lot of fun in revision to look forward to then. Good times.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Seventy-three.
Words? Fifty-four thousand, two-hundred and forty-five.
Named characters? Thirty-one.