Amid moving madness, I stuck to my writing practice. This week six and a half hours were spent on writing with additional time spent researching and reviewing a couple of short stories for other people.

A lot of my previous time on the novel WIP has been spent on background research (characters, organizations, places, magic, etc.) and on reworking the early chapters. At some point, on the advice of a writing teacher, I pulled back on reworking and put notes for things to be changed in a document.

Now I am into sort of virgin territory. I have a complete outline for the novel, but I know this is mutable. I don’t always know how a character will get from Point A to Point B, just that it happens. I learn how it happens from writing the interactions of characters in scenes. For me, that’s the only way to figure it out.

And the characters grow and change! Sometimes they won’t cooperate with my original deus ex machina. Gah! a character might tell me. I’d never do something as stupid as that. Finding out what the characters are really going to do is one of the most satisfying things about writing for me.

So… I completed a rough draft of a new scene this week and notched almost nine hundred words in my writing belt. The WIP now sits at just over 53,000 words.