Anyone who has followed me over the past year would be aware of my Twitter Fiction project. No doubt, they would have seen me charge ahead for a couple of months, then get more sketchy with my writing, before finally grinding to a halt some five months ago.
As in my recent post, I’ve climbed back on to the wagon and have been working slowly but steadily again for the past week. So this post is both my weekly update for Week I-don’t-know-what and an acknowledgment of the completion of Chapter 11.
I’ve also passed the 16,000-word mark this week, which for me at least is a pretty big deal. I anticipate the book being somewhere over the 20,000 words when done, but I’m not pre-empting that. The story will be as long or as short as it needs to be to tell the narrative I have in my head.
The thing that makes me shake my head is why I actually stopped writing for those few months. Now that I have been back deep into my story again, I have been enjoying the creative process enormously. I had the story completely mapped out, it was really a case of building the scenes and tying the loose threads I left out there all together.
I was particularly proud of a couple of bits of dialogue that I came up with. I feel that having believable, colloquial dialogue is a big part of making our characters feel human. They not only walk around their world, but they must also interact as part of it. I love writing dialogue, and hopefully, that shows through when you read it.
With the creative juices flowing again, my brain has started to tick over the beginnings of my next book. I won’t be going anywhere near that one until I finish “The Body in the Building,” but I intend to give Nat Shaw another story (assuming she survives this adventure, of course!). Again, not a sequel, just as “Body” is not a sequel to “Map.” Nat is just a fun character to write to, there are elements of myself in her, and elements that are nothing like me.
For now, I am really, really happy to be writing again, and with luck and persistence, I’ll have “The Body in the Building” laid out by late January. I won’t sign that in blood, because I want the story to travel unimpeded by arbitrary timeframes.
But it’s a goal.