I’m at 15,729 words, and still enjoying the first-drafting process of discovery. It’s gone a little slowly these past two weeks due to some travel and the holiday, but I’m still feeling the energy and as soon as I post this I am diving back in.

I’ve set myself a mini-goal of getting to 20K by the end of the month. Because I am not above self-bribery as a motivational tool, I have a thematically appropriate reward for myself if I reach that goal.

Then it will be time to focus back on Mirable Chalice during December, so that I can get my second round of revisions back to my editor at the beginning of 2009. Which, as you may have noticed, is the year Fortune’s Folly will finally be out! That means I’ll be talking more about the book here, and most likely doing a couple give-aways with my remaining bound galleys (ARCs). I’m also always happy to answer questions about the book, the quest for publication, and any other related topics. So if anyone out there has a question, now would be a good time to ask it.

I spent about an hour staring at a blinking cursor Sunday morning, typing something, deleting it, typing something different, deleting it, typing something almost the same, deleting it (you get the picture, right?). I procrastinated by hanging up new artwork over my desk (things like this and this from my undergraduate stint at the Geometry Center) and finding a new desktop image (the Orion Nebula from the Hubble site) and setting up my playlist for the new book.

Then I spent an hour writing the first page of Circus Galacticus in third-person, struggling to find my main character’s voice and persona. Then I went on a hike with Bob and Charlie, and came back and ditched it all, and restarted in first person. As of Monday’s writing session I have over 2.5K words and my main character is alive in my head. She is developing characteristic ways of speaking, and quirks and flaws and strengths.

It’s funny, because I never really liked first-person as a kid. I turned away from books written in it. I liked third-person, which felt like the “proper” mode to tell a story in. I wrote my own first four (now trunked) novels in third-person. Now, I would bet at least half the books I read are first-person, including some of my favorites. And Fortune’s Folly and Mirable Chalice are both told from a first-person point of view.

With this new project, I thought perhaps I was getting stuck in a rut, that maybe I ought to try third again and see if I could make it work. What I discovered this weekend is that no, this book wants to be first-person. And if that’s what works, that’s what I’m going to do.

But beginnings are hard. The possibilities can be paralyzing, until you just take a deep breath and leap, and remind yourself you can always change it later.

Five years ago I had just started the first draft of Fortune’s Folly. A friend was doing NaNoWriMo and asked if I wanted to join a group of others doing the same. My current project at the time wasn’t really working, and I decided writing with a bunch of other crazy people and cheering one another on sounded like fun. I had an idea I’d been noodling for a while, about a girl who told fake fortunes and then had to make one come true. So off I went!  Of course, none of what I wrote in the first few days is probably even still in the book, since I rewrote my first chapter (a couple times) in the following years.

I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year but I am starting a brand new project. I’ve set myself a smaller goal of 20K. My hope is to balance out the freedom of a fast rough draft with the intention of getting the main characters real and alive in my head right from the start. Because one thing I’ve learned the hard way is that I can fix plot a lot more easily than I can fix cardboard characters.

The new project has a working title of Circus Galacticus, and is the story of a girl who runs away to join an intergalactic circus. She’s brash and kind of a show-off, but also loyal and brave. Hopefully in a few moments she will start telling me her story in her own words.