Okay, yesterday was a total bust. I finished a chapter in the morning, but didn't get another thing written. Even when I went to two different places to try to kick my brain into gear! I think that I was too tired or something. Plus, almost three hours of my afternoon were taken up by taking my son to the Urgent Care. Luckily, nothing was broken - but what a time suck. Maybe if I had been able to nap in that time then I would have been able to write later.
Oh well, can't go back. I can, however, feel like a loser because I don't know what happens next in my book. At all. Stephan King, in his amazing book On Writing, said to get to know your characters and then give them a challenge - they'll tell you what happens. Usually that's how I operate, but this time I started with a scene in my head. A woman wakes up screaming from nightmares of blood and death, she has spent her entire life trying to keep them under control and in her adult years has turned to street drugs. Her dreams are actually a power that she is unaware of and she has never had anyone to guide her - she was abandoned at birth. I had a vague notion that bad people with bad ideas find out about her and come for her, man comes to help rescue, they are mates, yadda yadda yadda.
That was where it all began and now it has turned into a mess. I don't know or understand my hero character - he's an icon. I barely like him, he's a dominant male beefcake. The story is falling apart because I don't like him or want her to be with him. I want her to be with the drug dealer. He's flawed, weak and broken. But I think that under it all, when the big moment comes, that he will pull through.
Okay. Wow.
I sometimes find that I realize how I really feel about something when I'm explaining it to someone else. Right now, I think I just had one of those moments. How it escaped me I will never know. Rookie mistake. But I think that I have hours of rewrites ahead of me. And a much better book than I had feared.
Nice.
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