Reghan Skerry

It’s been a really good week on the NaNoWriMo-prep front.

Well. Mostly. It started out good.

It started out good enough that I’m not worried about the fact that I’ve come down with yet another cold (or possibly a mild case of the flu this time?), and I haven’t made any real progress the for the last day or so.

(As an aside: I really haven’t been kidding when I say that it seems like every 3-4 years, I get everything. My theory—and I’m sure that there’s no scientific basis for this, but please leave me my illusions—is that every few years, all the viruses mutate enough that my otherwise-solid immune system can’t cope. I’m just on a weird cycle where it all happens at once, instead of a few viruses every year.)

I’ve spent most of this week working on my secondary characters, giving them life and personality and figuring out what their stories are, rather than just thinking about how they impact the main character and her story. It’s been incredibly helpful—every character I figure out helps flesh out the world, develop subplots, and generally fill in the gaps in my outline.

That’s the other thing I’ve been doing: spreading my index cards out on the floor in a grid, and staring at them a lot.

I mean. It’s more than that. I’m figuring out the shape of the story (it’s much more straightforward than last year’s project), and looking at the scenes I have and thinking about what scenes I need to make everything else work. But there’s a lot of staring and frowning and false-starts involved.

(I’m also trying to keep the cat from walking over, laying on, or stealing the index cards. That’s actually the hardest part of this whole thing.)

I’m not ready for NaNo. There’s less than a week to go (!!!), and I’m not feeling well, and I’ve still got giant plot holes to paper over. But, at the same time, I could be ready. I could start writing right now, and it wouldn’t be a disaster.

I don’t want to. I still want to (and I’m going to try to) get this story really ready to go over the next few days. I want to sleep and try to shake off this cold. (And I’m not going to have much choice, there.)

But I could.