Small progress day

I woke up early and added a few more words to my WIP, Serang. It didn’t amount to much. When 8:00 rolled around, I talked to my parents for an hour.

Beyond that it was time for a Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich, with a fresh cup of coffee. I added a few more words after that. All in all, it felt like a thousand new words.

Then I quit the new words idea. I needed to reread and make small corrections before sending it to my critique group. I like what’s there, but I’m always nervous about middle sections. Guess I’ll find out what they think later this week.

I should have broken it into two submissions. I didn’t really plan to get that much new stuff accomplished. My wife visiting out of state was spontaneous, so I made the best of it.

Last night I watched a dumpster fire of a ballgame instead of typing away. There’s one on now too, but it looks a bit better.

My wife made it back about an hour ago, and it looks like a wrap on my writing weekend. All in all, it was outstanding. It may be a year before I get this kind of opportunity again, so I made the best of it.

Right now, Serang and her master are camped at the mouth of a canyon and ready to enter the Temple of Wind. It’s probably good to stop here and dwell on it for a week. I need to kind of foreshadow something that is going to happen near the end of the story, and a bit of time might help me do a better job of it.

I also need to consider wind, sounds, echoes, temperatures, shadows, and more for the Temple of Wind. Time is my friend now.

Back to the real world tomorrow.

Not what I expected.

I went to bed last night with visions of finishing The Yak Guy Project. I needed about ten thousand words, and expected to knock it out today. You see, I had a visitor yesterday.

These guys only appear to me about once or twice per year. It's been that way since I was small. Golden Eagles, all the time, but not Bald Eagles. They always herald some version of good luck. It may be a day when I caught the largest fish or some other small item, but it always works.

I had a working lunch with a colleague yesterday. On my way to the restaurant, an eagle flew over my truck. He wasn't close enough to scratch the paint with his talons, but he wasn't much further either.

The fact is I can't force the eagle. He foreshadows luck of some kind, but I can't manipulate it to what I want. I wanted word count, but that isn't why he showed up.

I managed less than a thousand words of fiction today. If you want to see why, you'll have to visit the Entertaining Stories Facebook Page, because they won't let me upload videos here. Not without going through YouTube first. (Hint, it's Otto.)

Have I ever mentioned,”You Can't Always Get What You Want” is one of my favorite songs. It's so true in so many ways.

I know the eagle is telling me something, but have no idea what. Sometimes it amazes me when it happens a week later, but it happens.

Some of you probably think I'm crazy, but when you observe something enough times you start to pay attention.

I managed to be productive in other ways. I wrote some blog posts, with frequent interruptions. I communicated with my Story Empire colleagues about an upcoming project, and we moved it forward.

Something is on my horizon, so I'm kind of excited about that. It could be something small, but it adds a nice perspective to the weekend.

Building author fences

This is going to be a bit of a free writing exercise. It occurs to me that when we write fiction, we are building fences for ourselves.

It occurs to me that with every word we write, we build a fence. To illustrate, let’s start with a title. I’ll pick on myself, and my book Will O’ the Wisp. Readers are going to expect that at some point in the story, it’s going to relate to a Will O’ the Wisp. Nothing is completely fenced in yet, and it could be a metaphorical thing someone is chasing. In my case it involved an actual Will O’ the Wisp.

On page one we will introduce a character. I introduced Patty Hall as a fifteen year old girl. I fenced myself into not making the story all about a man of any age. There can be male characters, and there were.

By the end of the first chapter, we knew Patty wore corrective leg braces, and the story was set in the 1970s.

This means a fence went up technologically. Patty couldn’t listen to an iPod, or use a cellular phone. She’s going to get grief over her leg braces. This can be real or imagined, but it needs to happen.

Every word we write helps fence in our story. We need to remember the fences we’ve already built as we get deeper into the story. If we establish a firm genre, like mystery, we probably can’t abandon that half way through and turn it into science fiction. There might be some ability to move from closely related genres, like mystery and suspense. The fence means it isn’t going to suddenly become a cute romance halfway through act 2.

In a similar fashion, if vampires burn up in the sunlight, they can’t suddenly start running around on a sunny beach.

There are some stories that cross genres, but that gets established early on. Star Wars is both fantasy and science fiction. There was a fence though, it didn’t suddenly become a comedy.

Readers expect certain things. We can surprise them, and hope we do. It still has to happen within the fences we built. This doesn’t prohibit the first zombie from showing up in Act 3. It means you have to build a fence that lets readers know there are zombies before they see one. This is foreshadowing.

I suppose if I want to keep pushing this idea, editing is moving the fences around to better enclose the parcel.

I really don’t know where I’m going with this, but I’ve always thought of writing like building fences. By the time I get to Act 3, I have my story almost completely fenced off. I’m just closing my parcel off in the denouement stage.

I warned you this was free writing. Does this make sense to anyone except me?