What does it mean for my writing when the weather is nice? It means I've taken the laptop outside onto my deck. It's a fabulous writing spot. We have a canopy over the deck, so it's nice and shady. The neighborhood is pretty quiet during the afternoon (at least, for a few more weeks, until the kids are out of school), and I can listen to the birds. It's very restful. Also, after I've gone to all the trouble of lugging the laptop and whatever else I need (water, phone, Blistex...) I feel that I HAVE to spend a minimum amount of time writing to make it worth it.
I've learned a big lesson about writing recently. When I was younger, I always used to think that writing was about getting brilliant flashes of inspiration, like lightning from Thor's hammer Mjolnir, and then sitting down and typing away furiously until a masterpiece was produced. In reality it's nothing like that. (Nor do I want the Thunder God to magically appear in front of me. I'm a Cap' girl, myself.) Rather, the story tends to write itself. You have to guide it, though. You have to have an idea of what you're going to write before you start. Otherwise you end up just staring at the screen, or the piece of paper, and then you give up and log onto Reddit.
The last few days of writing have been all about the flow that happens once you start writing. One of the great things is that, in writing a scene, I'll suddenly come up with a way to link it to a scene I've written previously. I tend to write in this really boring way where I have a bunch of individual scenes that are not always quite in order and don't quite fit together. But now, being able to join a scene to something I'm currently writing makes the story flow much better. It's more cohesive.
Today's scene is showing a bit of Derrel's home life. It's particularly interesting for me, especially after writing "Fire Child". The short story is the "before", this is the "after". In "Fire Child" we see the Aru family in a setting that's pseudo-Regency England. Now, in the novel, we see them a year later, refugees in an eastern forest town. Things have changed a lot.
Derrel makes an interesting observation here:
"In a sense, it was almost enough to make him laugh: his mother on one side of the room, firmly holding onto her traditions and dignity in her elegant morning dress, hair pinned up, and teacup in hand, and on the other side, his father, slouching in despair and drinking with abandon."
After this, his father, the fallen Viscount, will try to start an argument with him, and Derrel will storm out. He will end up running off into the forest to the waterfall he likes to go to. There he will overhear a secret conversation between two men (later we find out that they're part of the Yalu) and will encounter Robin there.
The linking of scenes occurs somewhere in the beginning of it. I linked in an old scene where Derrel remembers the first time he bought goods from Robin. It was a random reflection of his that was just floating around on the Word document. Now it has a good place. We'll see if it holds up during the editing process.
All in all, the daily writing is going pretty well! We'll see how this weekend goes though!
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