Christmas was an awesome day! It was also a very busy day, but very good. Even though it was busy, I could have written a lot more a lot earlier, but as usual I kept putting it off. And also as usual when I did stop putting it off, I really got into the story and had fun with it…
I’m really excited with this scene. It’s a conversation between Elijah and Leila, and it starts to show how Ian is getting dragged into the court intrigue, as well as drawing out Leila’s anxieties about her father trying to marry her off and her inner desires to go off and explore the world, have adventures and all that stuff.
As usual, stuff came to me in the act of writing that I didn’t even think of when I planned out this part of the story. I’m starting to get excited to see how the novel is going to end. As of now, I really have no clue. It’s going to be just as much a surprise to me as to any of my readers.
I just hope I can finish the rough draft by April like I wanted. It’s already over 61,000 words, but it’s still not quite halfway finished. I still have at least one character that I want to introduce, and I have a lot of work to do on my other characters as well. I want to show how they meet their challenges and change, but none of them has really started to change at all. Except maybe Ian, but I haven’t figured out how.
I was chatting with this one girl from the writing group the other night, and asked her what she thought a good maximum length for a novel was (I’m kind of nervous about this, can you tell?) and she gave a really good answer. She said that a good novel is exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story. That makes good sense, both on a gut level and as a general rule. So that’s what I’m going to stick to as I write this novel.
So, Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you had a marvelous day! I sure did. And now, since it’s past 4am over here in Massachusetts, I am going to bed…right…now…zzzzzzzzzzzz
