My Nethermore progress bar has been stuck for a while now at around 40% done on the first draft of the novel. I’ve spent many a night staring at the ceiling while I tried to figure out what exactly has stopped me in my tracks.
Several ideas have come to mind, and I’m not sure if I’m addressing the real issues or am only seeing symptoms of a bigger problem. I think I’ve started the story incorrectly, or at least started some of the viewpoints in the wrong way. The book has been largely unfocused as far as what the characters are doing and what they want. This makes for bad fiction. Who wants to read about someone with no drive, or no discernable goals, or so many goals that the character can’t decide what to do? That’s way too much like real life.
I spent all my writing time this weekend–yes, I did find some!–reworking some plot points and the beginnings for two of the three main viewpoint characters. The outline that I’ve come up with will hopefully cure some of the problems that were holding me back. The beginnings are snappier now, and get into the meat of the conflicts that the characters are dealing with. One of the biggest changes I’m making is combining two major characters and one minor character into just one character. That’s change the plot considerably, but it’s trimmed it down and made the remaining character more interesting to me. This change will also make for a shorter book (meaning, I’ll probably hit the 200k mark instead of going considerably over that).
Man, this novel business is hard work.
In other news, take a look at our Ninja pictures from World Con. I’m on the far left, followed by Bryce, Dan, and Kimball. We had just arrived back from the Nippon 2007 party and were probably suffering from the effects of having eaten squid-sicles.
