Writerly Update

Current wordcount: 34,100 words. Making progress, albeit at the speed of a striking snail. It's just not the same as November. I'm hoping for a productivity boost next month, though, when I'm acting as accountability for a friend who's staging an April version of NaNoWriMo. The main thing for me is to get back in the groove of writing something every day. I've let myself slip quite a bit over the last couple months.

Current feeling: I'm really liking the way this is turning out. Actually, a better way to put that is: I feel like I'm getting back to my roots. I've always been an avid reader of fantasy. From C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia in the second grade, at least nine out of every ten books I've read has had something markedly fantastic about it, from the not-really-magic unusualities of The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer (which is really more sci-fi, I suppose) to the all-out, amazingly inventive, not one but two magic systems in Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen (complete with magic bells). The only thing I'm slightly worried about is that I'm rereading said trilogy at the moment (I finished Lirael earlier today and am about to start Abhorsen) and quite a bit of the musical aspect of Nix's magic seems to be seeping into mine.

But back to what I was actually saying. Lately I've been focusing on the political aspects of my story, the more mundane problems of plot and characterization, and leaving little time for the magic that I think will make it really shine, the truly fantastic element that I grew up loving. Somehow, I conveniently left myself little clues that I can expound on when I go back through, to make it more apparent that the magic exists before it actually comes out in the open (a problem of mine that was especially marked in the first rough draft I ever finished, from NaNo 2005, which I sadly still have not been able to pull out and revise), but it is going to require a lot of reworking to make all fit like I want it to. Ah well. A worry for another day.

Happy Monday to everyone. I hope your writing and other pursuits are going well.