Hey, 500 words per day isn’t that tough!

I’m surprised how easy it is, in fact! About half an hour of writing. When I know what I want to do, it flows out nice and easy. Almost like I’m reading my story as I write it. It might just be as easy as updating my photoblog each night. At this rate, it won’t be hard at all to get into a daily habit! Just gotta knuckle down and do it for a while, until it becomes second nature.

I’m at 3,851 words right now for chapter one, rewriting it from scratch. Not bad at all. And I think it works a lot better than what I had before. The first attempt just didn’t get into the action fast enough. Reigheena made the keen observation that there wasn’t anything in the first page to intrigue the reader and make him (or her) want to read further. The first sentence of the rewrite goes like this: The Avion-45 was more than a hundred parsecs from inhabited space, and that fact alone was enough to scare Sayed.

It seems to work better. Right away, you know that something is wrong and that the character is struggling with it. I might end up working on it some more (in fact, I know I will, since beginnings are so freaking difficult to get right), but for now, I think it works.

I noticed something interesting as I was writing. A couple of days ago, I was focusing most of my attention on descriptions of the technology on the spaceship, and describing how it worked. After all, I think that that kind of stuff is really interesting. But I seemed to be getting stuck. So then, the next day I looked at it again, and decided that I’d cut down the descriptions a little bit and focus on what Sayed (the protagonist) was thinking and feeling. Voila! I got unstuck and the story just seemed to flow!

Aneeka told me that she didn’t like the dialogue between the captain and the crew in the first chapter–all the “lieutenant so and so, do such and such,” “yes, sir!” “lieutenant so and so, what is our weapons status?” “everything running optimally, sir,” etc. However, I think it’s good to keep it in. I’ve modified it a bit, so that it’s not just a bunch of yes, sir!’s, but I think it’s important because when the ship gets hit by an unknown weapon and all the systems go dead, the abrupt change in the way the characters interact gives a good sense of the anxiety and chaos that I want to get across. Things seem to be going smoothly, officially, almost monotonously, and then something unexpected happens and everyone becomes unbalanced. Instead of describing it all, it comes across in the dialogue and the action.