WRITING THE RELIC

Do you know how many versions of Chapter Fourteen I've written over the last seven days? A lot. Fortunately I'm happy to report that the daily grind has paid off with a finished chapter, and a sense of rejuvenation at that. I have to admit that my commitment to writing a little bit every day, while helpful to my ultimate goal of finishing my novel, started to feel a lot more like a chore over the past week. I had what felt like a great opening to the chapter, but when I followed it to it's conclusion, I realized that it just wouldn't work, and had to archive that version somewhere else and start over. Who knows, I might be able to work it in somewhere else. Speaking of following the story to its conclusion, I do want to give an update about the overall story block I mentioned in my last post, namely that I figured it out. Mostly. Really, in my brainstorming, I discovered a way to integrate some characters from earlier in the book into this later half in a meaningful

Okay, I hit another wall today. Not a literal wall, I mean a wall of writer's block. Although, now that I think about it I did hit my head against the wall when I woke up this morning... That's probably the reason for my woes. So I've been reading a lot about writing novels and about so-called 'plotters' and 'pantsers.' For those of you who don't know, a plotter is someone who sits down and plots their book out from start to finish with an outline, and a pantser is someone who flies by the seat of their pants. Kind of dumb names, but whatever. As I've thought about these weird categories, I've determined that I'm far more pantser in my writing than plotter. Sure, I have had a basic idea of the elements I want in the story, but the story itself is kind of just loosely jangling around in my head. I have an idea of the end, but it's not really known how I'll get there just yet. The problem is that tonight I got a wild idea that I sho

I'm happy to report that I've gone a good month or so where I've written something every single day. Big accomplishment, right? Well I believe it is, considering I petered out after a couple weeks. Or did I? Oh well, all I remember is hitting a road block in Chapter Seven and I couldn't work my way around it, so I just stopped, assuring myself I'd be back once I figured it out. Over a year later, I finally figured out the problem: Chapter Seven! And Six, and Five, I think. Really all of them were a bit of a problem. I had this subplot where one of my characters, Vincent, betrayed two others, and they stopped him from shooting them. Following that attempt on their lives, they just kind of lugged him around the rest of the time as an annoying sidekick that they hated. The problem with this betrayal was that it kind of lost the motivational steam for one of my two protagonists, Liam. He wasn't a driving force for the plot anymore as all he wanted to do was get ri