I am Exposition Man today

I start­ed by flesh­ing out some of what I’d already writ­ten, pro­vid­ing some more detail in the con­ver­sa­tion that ends the first chap­ter. I’ve also decid­ed to upgrade a minor char­ac­ter; he may still be a minor char­ac­ter, but I’ve decid­ed against dis­card­ing him. He’ll appear again.

That flesh­ing-out progress is the sort of thing I’m prob­a­bly not «sup­posed» to do dur­ing NaNoW­riMo. The plan is to get the words out there, fast and furi­ous, not spend a cou­ple of hours increas­ing my word count by only a cou­ple hun­dred. But I think these tweaks and addi­tions improve the work, so that’s fine.

From there I went back to my sec­ond chap­ter. I think I’m using too much expo­si­tion. I’m describ­ing too much past and not enough sto­ry­line. It’s a tough bal­ance to strike; I have char­ac­ters that I want the read­er to get to know and sit­u­a­tions that I want them to under­stand, and so I want to get as much of the back­sto­ry out as possible.

After a break for din­ner, I got back into the writ­ing and am fin­ish­ing up the day with 2,436 words total for the day, 6,851 words in to the project. This puts me ahead of sched­ule by NaNoW­riMo’s 50,000 word goal but I would like to be able to take a day or two off at some point, and maybe have the lat­i­tude to slow down, and maybe focus on some oth­er things. And 50,000 words is not going to tell this story.

Today’s writ­ing music: Eury­th­mics 1984, Fugazi Repeater + 3 Songs. Juno Reac­tor Gold­en Sun of the Great East. And a lot of silence, too.