Snowmageddon! Hooray!

So for the past week, a series of crazy snowstorms has been pelting the Mid-Atlantic.  President Obama has dubbed it “snowmageddon,” and it’s so bad that all federal government offices have been closed since Friday.  With another storm hitting us tonight, it looks like we’re going to have the whole week off! Yay!!!

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been hanging out around the Barlow Center, watching movies, doing random stuff with my friends here in the program, taking naps in the middle of the day, and writing.  Lots of writing!  It’s awesome–I haven’t had this much free time since Christmas (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…)!

Today I didn’t write quite as much.  I got in about 1.1k words, a decent amount, but if I’d pushed myself I could have finished the current chapter.  Monday went much better, because I sat down and forced myself to write in the morning.  Once those initial hundred or so words were out, the rest came much easier.

On the first day of snowmageddon, when we were snowed in at Valley Forge, I got in over 1,000 words before noon.  It was rough going, though–nothing was flowing, and everything took a lot of effort.  I hate it when that happens–blegh.

But I think it was necessary, because now, the scenes are flying by pretty easy.  Sometimes, when I’m struggling with momentum, I find it helps if I take a day to focus and push myself through it.  Get rid of all distractions, put my butt in the chair, close all internet browsers, and just write, no matter how difficult.

My next novel, To Search the Starry Sea, is going to be a lot of fun.  It starts out almost exactly like Homer’s Odyssey, with the same basic conflict and setup.  Beyond that, however, I have nothing solid planned–I’m just following where the story takes me.  And boy, is it taking me to some crazy places!

For example, one of the first places Katriona (the Telemachus character) goes is a nearby world, ruled by a friend of her father’s.  To liven things up, I decided to have him live on a giant rotating space station, where the inside is covered by forests and jungles–scenery that Katriona has never seen.

This got me wondering, however: how did the jungle get there?  The answer: thousands of years ago, before superluminal space travel, a group of colonists set out for this world, freezing themselves in cryo.  When they got there, they found that a solar flare-up had rendered the planet uninhabitable, so instead they built this massive station, hoping that it would serve as a second ark for humanity.

Instead, a raiding party of space barbarians took them over, enslaved the colonists, and built their palace in the midst of the carefully maintained artificial biosphere.

This opened up a series of new possibilities for subplots, which shapes my protagonists interactions with the people here, which points her in new directions for the main plot–the next few places that she’s going to go.

This is discovery writing at its best.  Even though I have no clue where she’s going to go next, things are unfolding very nicely, and I’m excited to find out!