Writing Day 1 (of 24)

Well, I'd by lying if I said that today had gone anything like to schedule. I got up an hour later than I had intended, but that wasn't a problem...given that I spent about three hours postponing the start, for one reason or another that now seems completely and totally trivial. That blank document is always pretty daunting, and this time was no exception. Finally, I managed to pull myself together and actually make a start on this thing. Two chapters a day is my rough plan; for the Alamo books I set myself a minimum chapter length of two thousand words, but this time I'm going to three – I think the genre I'm now working in will benefit, especially as the POV characters are going to be more spread out than usual.

The first chapter went pretty much according to plan, a nice character introduction and battle scene, setting the first of the three plots into motion. I only realized today that this is what I am doing – entangling a trio of plots for this book, and it's already had an impact. The battle scene initially went about as tortuously as usual – for someone making a living writing action/adventure, I surely struggle getting the action down on paper, especially at the start – but I was rather satisfied with the outcome, so that went well.

Chapter two, on the other hand, was a bit more of a struggle. During the first chapter I stopped twice, in the second I lost count of the number of times I paused for some inspiration, and that despite the second chapter being the one that was clearest in my head. Again, this was character introduction and plot kickoff – I have another one of these to do tomorrow, before I can start actually progressing the plots a little. Already this is going to feel strange – in that normally I've written at least one chapter for each POV character every day, and this time it's going to be impossible. I'm not even going to revisit these characters until the fourth day from a POV perspective...

Speaking of which, I've already changed perspective POVs! I still have six, but I'm now working on the idea of having two for each plot, and as I was starting, one of them had three...and while I liked the character, it was a struggle to see why he needed a POV in this book. I can promote him for Book 2, and probably will, but for this book, he's dropping down to 'major character' status – and fortunately, I have a character in the wings to step into his shoes, so that won't be a problem. And god, Scrivener's 'random name generator' is useful, I was working it overtime today, and expect I will be in the future!

So the score for today: 6,366 words, 366 over my target. A good start.