When your characters take your story hostage

(Reposted from my deviantArt blog)

Blog lapse recently is due to the fact that I'm camped out in Houston for the week (I live in Los Angeles), visiting my stepdad and mum (and her awesomesauce cooking). :) Houston is where I grew up and went to grade/middle/high school, and I still think of it as my hometown. All mosquitoes aside, it's not half bad.

In book news, I've finished my revisions on Legend, and am back at work on Legend 2--although it always takes me a few days to get back into the groove. Currently L2 wordcount is at 32,085. I think my writing goals might be sporadic at best throughout Thanksgiving week, but we'll see how it goes.

In writing L2, I've started learning a few things about my writing habits. Writers usually fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of writing obsessively to a detailed outline, or writing freestyle where you just let every chapter take you wherever the story might go with no cohesive novel plan. I am no different. With L2, I started out with a general chapter-by-chapter outline but quickly realized about 7 chapters in that it was starting to veer off my planned path. Which is no surprise, seeing as Legend did the same thing. It's because as I write, my characters develop in ways that I don't expect, and their surprising motivations and actions start to change the mold of where the story's supposed to go. If I originally planned for everyone to meet in some bordertown, for instance, one of the characters will mutiny halfway there and strike out on their own. Or some other character might deceive another out of jealousy and/or spite. This stuff all happens out of nowhere, and when they come up, I'm always blindsided by it. And then I can do nothing but listen to the characters, even though they usually leave my neatly plotted outline in an apocalyptic wreck.

This used to freak me out a bit, as it does not help me plan out an accurate schedule for when I can finish the book in question. But lately I've learned that this is simply my brain's process, that in the end all of the pieces will connect (sometimes with duct tape and string), and that the characters will still arrive at the basic ending I have chosen for them. That's one thing that hasn't changed so far--the beginnings and the ends of my stories. No matter what twists and turns my characters decide to take for me in the middles, the endings always come out the same. It's like they try to avoid their fates, in vain. Mwahaha.

Adventures of Book 2

I'm about a third of the way into Book 2 (about 30,000 words), and I'm discovering all sorts of interesting things about characters I thought I knew but have darker sides than I realized. This is one of my favorite and most nervewracking parts of the writing process. Even when I make a plot outline to follow, I find myself constantly straying from it because halfway through a chapter, something will happen and one of my characters will go "Hold on, I'm not going to say that. That's not who I am. I'm going to do THIS instead." And he/she will go off and do something that completely shocks me. Today is full of this sort of craziness. One of my characters has mutinied against me, and become something I didn't realize he/she could be. Weird. O_o

It solved a few plot problems I was having, but added new ones in the process. So I stopped writing for now, and for the next few days I'm going to do some plotting again to see if I can find my way back to something that makes sense. :) Hopefully in time for NanoWriMo. I highly doubt I'll be able to finish Nano, but I'd really really like to finish my first draft of Book 2 by the end of this year so I have some leeway to knock it into something presentable by the time my due date (April-ish of next year) rolls around!

In other news, Boyfriend and I were driving around this afternoon when he saw a big "Meg 2010" (i.e. Meg Whitman) campaign poster in a store window:

Boyfriend: Look. Meg 2010.
Me: MiG 2010? Ooooh, is that a new model? Where?
Boyfriend: ... No. MEG WHITMAN 2010.
Me: *utter disappointment* Oh. Not a new Russian fighter jet?
Boyfriend: Sometimes I wonder about you.

I ended up watching videos all afternoon of Russian fighter jets and listening to the Top Gun anthem. Then I ate a lot of pistachios. And that rounds out my writing day. :) (If my boss is reading this, I also did all of my day job work. Diligently. Scout's honor.)

And of course I leave you with one of the best anthems evar: