Worlds colliding

This thing keeps tak­ing me in unex­pect­ed direc­tions. What I thought had gone side­ways a cou­ple days ago has gone far­ther sideways.

Yes­ter­day I did­n’t get as much writ­ing done and I did­n’t think I’d get much done today because I had a lot of oth­er work to do. But I carved out some time in the morn­ing and then got on a roll in the late evening. I fin­ished a 3500 word chap­ter (2,824 of which were writ­ten in the past 24 hours) that had numer­ous challenges.

I wrote my first love scene, which was unex­pect­ed. I did­n’t expect to have any­thing even sort of racy (this was pret­ty tame by almost any stan­dards) in this project, but as I was paint­ing myself far­ther into a cor­ner I did­n’t know how to write myself out of, the solu­tion pre­sent­ed itself. The scene not only reveals a lot about the char­ac­ters but also about what the whole sto­ry is about. It was chal­leng­ing because I haven’t writ­ten much like it, at least not in years.

I’m a lit­tle afraid of how it will read in the light of anoth­er day, but right now I feel amazed by what has got­ten solved and resolved and what new ques­tions have come up. And I’m get­ting out of expo­si­tion jail, which is a good thing.

I also showed a chap­ter from the project to some­one else for feed­back for the first time and actu­al­ly talked over the plot. I’ve been avoid­ing doing any of that because I don’t want to get into any of the many traps from solic­it­ing feed­back too soon. This may have been too soon, but it was just one chap­ter I showed and the con­ver­sa­tion was very productive.

Now I’m left a bit stunned. I have a lot more to do, and I have a lot more to do that isn’t writ­ing. So I don’t have a day to rest, just have to get back to it all in the morning.