My Soul Hath Elbow Room!

The bad news: Exodus features no central dilemma, and not one of its plot strands wraps up in a satisfactory manner at the end of the current plan: basically, at the end of this novel, everyone's fucked. Sure, I can kill off the fairies, but that doesn't actually solve anything; in fact it makes the end worse due to the Unfortunate Implications of that much power flying around...

The good news, sort of: While attacking the bad news with a sledgehammer and some mindmapping software, I realised that Exodus has a unified theme. It's even the one that the title references!

If it ever gets published finished through a basic plothole check unscathed, I'm totally going to pretend I did that on purpose.

Okay, so Screnzy is a bust. Or at least, this year it is... I can't seem to silence my inner editor enough while simultaneously trying to visualise a television show for the first time ever. I'll poke the script over the next year or so, and then maybe next year...

I am, however, determined not to waste the month, so it's back to NaNo and at least 1,000 words/day (spliced scenes from Draft 1 count towards this total). Draft 2's master file is up to 13,488 words, and an awful lot neater than Draft 1.

So, I'm still doing Screnzy in spirit, if not in practice, I suppose.

Icon is of course in reference to my absolute determination to finish this sodding book at any cost, not to my abject failure to do the same for Screnzy. I do hope that at some point I'll be able to start feeling the love for Exodus again; it's got a lot of my favourite characters in it.

Today, for the first time since about the fifteenth of November, I felt like I knew what the hell I was doing.

I wrote the Prologue. It feels right; unpolished, sure, and there's at least one glaring mistake in it, but it's the first scene I've written in a while that had the right atmosphere for the world, the right reactions, the right balance between description and action. It feels... programmatic, as though now I've got that down, I should be able to replicate it when I inevitably scrap 90% of the material in this draft and redo it.

It feels good. I had my first writing-based adrenaline rush in a good long while.

And I even got a title out of it. It's silly, really, because it's been staring me in the face for ages.

My working title is no longer 'NaNoWriMo08', thank goodness. It's Exodus.