My story is double spaced, in 12 point Courier New, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome to break 100 pages. What’s surprising to me is that that translates to 77 pages in single spaced 12 point Times New Roman. I thought that my story was advancing really fast, but now, I’m not quite so sure. A lot has happened so far, but I’m just getting to the point where Ian really begins to interact with the people of the strange planet–the part where his presence starts to upset the established order and turn society upside down. Well, if it’s not progressing exactly as fast as I thought it was, at least it’s not progressing too slow. This is probably a pretty healthy pace.
I was going to do a lot of other stuff tonight, but then I thought about how if you really want to be a writer, or into writing, the only real rule that you MUST keep is that you must write. So that’s what I decided to do. And it’s only barely midnight. Maybe I’ll actually finish some of my homework. Or maybe I’m too tired…
This really is the point where things start to get more difficult. The act of writing was a lot more difficult for me now than it was a while ago. I don’t know exactly why. The words didn’t seem to flow out exactly the way I wanted them to, so I had to change my sentences a lot as I was writing them. I’ll probably end up completely changing them again in the rewrite, but it was hard just to put the stuff out. Writing is a lot of work.
I am really happy, though, that things are progressing well. I’m just about where I want to be, in terms of the stopping point that I want to arrive at before November (and <gasp> nanowrimo comes upon us!!!). I’m going to have to put this story on hold for nanowrimo. I hope that nanowrimo doesn’t kill me–or my grades.
But another good thing is that I’m getting good ideas for what happens in the next few pages as I’m writing. For example, about a month ago, I had a vague idea of a couple of characters that might be interesting, a possible rivalry between a naive Ian and a jealous prince, and some vague ideas about how the ancestors of the people of this planet pray towards the spaceships that brought them to the planet’s surface, much like how the Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca. As I was writing, those ideas began to take a much more definite form, and I know exactly how I want the main plot to progress (I didn’t necessarily know that a month ago). Now, as I’m preparing to introduce a couple of the new characters that I’d thought of a month or two ago, they seem to be taking life in my head, as if I know who they are and know exactly how to start telling their stories. I just want to get to the point now where they start to come in, so I can have them interact with the other characters and make the story more interesting than it already is.
Another good thing happened just yesterday. I was at the quark opening social (which was AWESOME!!! Almost a hundred geeks like me gathered into a tight, confined space, watching sci fi and anime, playing computer games, and talking about Final Fantasy and other rpgs), and one of the new members (Danke) of the writing group asked me about my story. She was asking specifically about the plot, so there really was no way I could get around telling her all about it (I tried–“it’s about a clash of cultures”–but that wasn’t enough). To my surprise, after about ten or fifteen minutes of me monologuing about the plot of the story, she was still interested. This leads me to two conclusions: 1) girls who like sci fi are AWESOME and 2) the story in my head has got some good potential.
Well, it’s only 12:30, but I just laid down for a couple of minutes, and it felt so good that I think I’m going to bed right now.
