45,000

Just passed the 45,000 mark with Orphan Wars. I'm getting pretty close to NaNoWriMo length here! I'm very, very happy with my progress so far on this project. It's been wonderful, rewarding, and encouraging, although lately I feel like I have very little foundation for what I'm writing. The beginning felt so solid, mostly because a) it's a beginning, those usually do feel good (there's very little that can go "wrong" when you've just barely started), and b) I've written and rewritten the beginning dozens of times and I know it by heart. Even though it's changed a lot, I still know the general order in which important things happen. But now I'm in unknown territory. As far as word count and pages go, I'm about equal with the farthest I've ever gotten with this project, which happened once. But as far as progress with the story goes, I'm probably about twice as far. So it's a little weird for me to be finally introducing these characters I've spent so much time on and introducing these elements that have become so important.

Even though I've thought so much about these characters (the ones besides Zidaiku and Angel and Melina), for some reason as I write them in now they seem... undeveloped and flat. I mean, I know they're not (at least not completely), but since I have no experience using them in actual story text, it's hard for me to get their descriptions and dialogue right. I think one of the first things I'm going to do after I get done with the rough draft is spend a lot of time on character development to figure out how each of these characters speak and move and dress and what their faces look like (in more than just general terms) in order to get them to pop off the page much more. I think that's one of the biggest keys to having a great novel is getting the characters to be very real and exciting, and description and dialogue are the ways to do that.

Also, as you can see from today's snippet (if you're reading this before I change it), the first kiss between Zidaiku and Melina happened here, about halfway through the book (projected). It wasn't planned, but I think it turned out very well and I like it. Now, how to keep their romance interesting for the rest of the story... Hmm...