Novel Ephiphany

Oof.  I left my iPad at work.  It's interesting to see how often I check it for social media.

I worked on story planning this morning since I didn't have ready access to a word processor.  A few weeks ago, I wrote some scenes based on a photo swap. Last night I printed out what I had and this morning I worked on outlining a story.  I'm using the term "outlining" in a very lose fashion, because all I really did was write down a character's birthday, the birth of the couple's child, and various holidays on an agenda.   The next step is to write things like "growing anxiety" and "morning sickness."  And I should come up with a threat that is exterior so this doesn't turn into 9000 words of brooding.

I also drew the floorplan for the characters' house, which will require a re-write of the blocking; but this is a good thing as the characters lived in an apartment when I started writing the scenes and upgraded to a house by the end.

And then I stared at the agenda, which covers ten months, and started to look at each month in terms of word count and just ho long a piece was a I writing?

I like this story idea and I'm toying with turning it into a novel; on one hand I need to start writing novels if ... well ... actually -- I need to start writing novels to see if I like writing novels, not to secure an old writer's pension (although that would be really nice, too).  ...Yeah; the reason I don't want to turn this idea (which I really like) into a novel isn't because first novels are almost always bad, the reason (which I've just discovered) is because I don't want the focus on product-product-product to suck all the joy out of writing a novel, and then make me disappointed with it at the end when I've written a bad first novel chock full of John Things(tm)  which confuse everyone (and are unmarketable) and no one buys.

Whew.  OK.  Worked that out.  Time to get cracking.

But first, the Day Jobbe.