Building Momentum

I got somewhat back on track with the new book yesterday, moving ahead a little bit while adding about 3,000 words to what I’d written. And now I already know I need to do some more tinkering with what I did yesterday. My struggle with this book is going to be keeping the emotional reactions realistic. I keep trying to just move ahead with the plot, which means I’m forgetting to think about how people would react in that situation. One of my characters is rather unflappable. She’s been through situations like this before and has been specifically trained in what to do in situations like this. That doesn’t mean she should be unemotional, though. She can be going through all the things she knows to do and resisting the urge to panic while still being very upset and worried. So far, my process for this book has been to write a chapter, then go back and rewrite the chapter to fix the character reactions. I’m hoping to eventually get into a groove where I get it right in the first place.

I think I may have a title for this one, finally. It’s been used before, but not in this genre, and not in several years.

It’s taking a bit of time to get into the mindset of that uninterrupted afternoon of work. For the most part, I’ve been able to avoid most of my usual time wasters, but I’m still having some trouble focusing. It’s hard to tell what the results are, since I’m still feeling my way in this story and doing a lot of rewriting and needing to do a lot of thinking. I’m spending more time on my writing every day, but not getting more output so far. Then again, these opening chapters shouldn’t require a lot of rewriting later, so that may end up saving me some time in the long run.

I’m hoping to do some work over the weekend to see if I can build up a little momentum. It would probably help if I didn’t also have two other story ideas swirling around in my brain, competing for attention, and that’s just new stuff, not counting the existing characters who pop up every so often to remind me they exist.