Life is CRAZY, but I swear I will finish this novel by the 25th of April as I planned!
I’ve got a lot of schoolwork on my plate and it never seems to go away. I’m always behind in Arabic, I’ve got a paper in PLSC 310 on something I know nothing about (immigration reform), I’m behind in reading the Book of Mormon and the New Testament, there’s always tons and tons of readings for my various classes, and if it’s not tests and papers and readings, it’s club meetings and friends and Arabic house duties.
But despite it all, I’m still doing about a thousand words a day.
I’ve started writing in microbursts–I’ll carry my flash drive with me, and when I’ve got five or ten minutes to myself, I’ll find a computer and write a few lines. I think it keeps me actively thinking about the story, and releases some of that angst that comes when you need to write but have difficulty bringing yourself to do it, for internal or external reasons.
I’ve been thinking up an ending for this story, now that I’m starting to get there. I have a few cool ideas, some of which I’ll probably have to throw out, but others that will probably develop themselves as I get to that point in the story.
One thing I’m uneasy about is trying to draw these two characters together. They need to get together before the end of the story, but I’m not quite sure how to do it. It’s going to be subtle, but I want it to actually work.
Right now, the two of them are stuck on this enormous space station. She’s from a pre-industrial society, and he’s from this spacefaring civilization but he was just released from his military service and doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s helping her out, since without help she just wouldn’t survive in this place, but he’s also stressed out because he’s low on cash, doesn’t have a place to stay, and needs to somehow get her back to her people. So, she’s really dependent on him, but he’s also really overstressed. It’s under these circumstances that I want to have them start drawing closer together–which I think can be done, I just don’t know what I’m doing.
She already knows that she’s attracted to him, but he doesn’t know that he’s attracted to her. What I want to do is have them help each other with their different needs, and through this become closer to each other. I suppose that I also need to start having them notice things in each other, such as the things that they find attractive, and have them draw closer through that. I don’t know when the guy is going to decide that he’s going to go back with the girl to her homeworld and marry her–whether that should be on the station or just before they land–but he needs to do it at some point soon. Things are complicated, however, by the fact that when he learned that he was betrothed to her, he ran away. Long story–but really, that had nothing to do with her, more to do with the fact that he was afraid of being made the new king.
I don’t know what I’m doing. But whatever I do, I want to do it within the next week to ten days so that I’ll have plenty of time to bring the rest of the story to a conclusion.
And now I need to get my precious sleep (and when you work a job at 7:30 AM, it is precious!)
