It's been a week. So I'm preparing to move house, but somehow I managed to work on my secret project during then. I'm trying to get back in the habit of writing every day.
I was really proud of my progress in the first half of the year and have been floundering a bit since, though I have been focused on editing The Damsel and not writing anything new until now. I wrote every day from the beginning of the year until June 2nd when I fell ill with minor stomach explosions.
So the first day of writing I pumped out almost 2,000 words, and yesterday over 500. I attribute the slow down to the fact I stared worrying if I was connecting all the great points I made in the beginning.
One thing that seem to be working for me is that I have decided each scene is going to have a reversal, and so I'm building the whole story around that. It works well for this kind of plot. I think about the scenes before writing. How the character is at the start of the scene and how I can tip that on it's head in a new way so that by the end of it they, and hopefully the reader, are tense, confused but excited about what will happen next. It's a lot of fun and it gives each scene a strong backbone. The rest of the plot points and character moments just coalesce around that. This is why I like short stories; you're quick to see results.
As usual, there's a more in-depth blog post for subscribers, where I talk about what my project actually is and the nitty gritty of the scenes I'm writing. So if you want to read it, you know what to do.