Breaking Through

That's right, I'm still alive. I told you I'd be back in April sometime.

I really haven't gone anywhere, there's just been a lot going on. Not a lot of time or brain power for creative pursuits.

I did manage to set a goal for Camp NaNo of 5,000 (a meager amount, but whatever), and I've just finished with 5,028. So, I've accomplished something. I wound up with two short stories revolving around portals to a sort of shadow dimension. I watched Stranger Things finally, and it's infiltrated my brain.

But the real goal was to get my mind off of my vampire novel, in the hopes that ideas for it would come when I wasn't trying. So there I was, last night, 40 words short of my 5,000 word goal, and I find myself working on my novel outline.  The distraction seems to have done the trick.

I still have all these subplots I'm not sure what to do with, and random scenes I'd like to incorporate, so I'm not in the home stretch by any means. 

There is a way of plotting a novel that looks more like connecting subway lines than a straight linear outline. I'm sure I've talked about it before (here). Anyway, it seems the most promising. The issue is that I don’t have any of my lines complete, so there's still a lot of stuff that I don't know where to put.

I'm also revamping (no pun intended) some characters and so I'm not totally sure what to do with them. There is a human girl, who is now named Beth due to some confusion, who thinks that main character Des is kind of creepy, but they get along anyway. But why? There is no real reason for them to get friendly, at least not in the way that they do. So her character is going to change drastically, making her not an ally, but not quite an antagonist, either. It's complicated. The scene in which she was brought in on the vampire secret is being moved to another character. Because I think it's better. Fun fact: that was one of the first scenes I ever thought of when I first started on this story in 2016.

I also will need to flesh out the vampire lore a bit more. I have all kinds of information that was never brought up. There's a whole thing about water…

So that's where I'm at, right now. Still kind of stuck, but actively trying to pull myself out of the bog of writer's block with the winch of inspiration.

I'll see you… soon?