Werewolf book!
Jul. 4th, 2011 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaPicked up Sanctuary again, and this time is going much better. Beginnings are a major weak point of mine--I rewrote The Novel's beginning at least six times--and this is my third shot at the beginning of my main character's POV (weird specificity b/c the book actually starts with another character's POV, which was really easy, but then made it hard to switch over to Dani's POV).
As I mentioned back in May, when I had my first werewolf-related false start, this will be my first attempt at writing a novel in the first person. Part of it is the genre; a lot of urban fantasy is in the first person. Part is that Dani just wants to be written in first, and has pretty much since before I finished the outline. It's an interesting experience, not least of which because she keeps wandering off on tangents that never would've happened in a third person narrative (she spent three paragraphs thinking about her hair a few thousand words ago). Other times I end up speeding through a scene without any thought at all, and have to go back in and figure out how to wiggle into Dani's head for the scene, because otherwise it is bare and empty and pretty useless as first person narration goes.
What keeps tripping me up is that Sanctuary is written in first person past, and my default setting for first person is present. Writing an entire novel in first present would probably drive me batty, though, so I went with it and am writing it in past. This has necessitated more than one instance of "Shit! Wrong tense!" already.
I'm also unsure how much of the exposition I'm doing is reasonable first person thought process and how much of it is infodump. I'm much better at spotting infodumps in the third person.
Today brought me up to 7,800 words, partway through chapter two. I don't have a concrete word count goal for this book--it's more like, "Between 80 and 100k words"--so as long as I write a respectable number of words a day on weekends and get some writing done at least two weekdays, I'll consider the draft going well.
I'm due to start working on Skywatch again in about two weeks, but I hope to be far enough into Sanctuary by then that switching back and forth won't be a problem. Though they're VERY different books, so we'll see how that works. Maybe Skywatch on weekday and Sanctuary on weekends . . ? We'll see.
As I mentioned back in May, when I had my first werewolf-related false start, this will be my first attempt at writing a novel in the first person. Part of it is the genre; a lot of urban fantasy is in the first person. Part is that Dani just wants to be written in first, and has pretty much since before I finished the outline. It's an interesting experience, not least of which because she keeps wandering off on tangents that never would've happened in a third person narrative (she spent three paragraphs thinking about her hair a few thousand words ago). Other times I end up speeding through a scene without any thought at all, and have to go back in and figure out how to wiggle into Dani's head for the scene, because otherwise it is bare and empty and pretty useless as first person narration goes.
What keeps tripping me up is that Sanctuary is written in first person past, and my default setting for first person is present. Writing an entire novel in first present would probably drive me batty, though, so I went with it and am writing it in past. This has necessitated more than one instance of "Shit! Wrong tense!" already.
I'm also unsure how much of the exposition I'm doing is reasonable first person thought process and how much of it is infodump. I'm much better at spotting infodumps in the third person.
Today brought me up to 7,800 words, partway through chapter two. I don't have a concrete word count goal for this book--it's more like, "Between 80 and 100k words"--so as long as I write a respectable number of words a day on weekends and get some writing done at least two weekdays, I'll consider the draft going well.
I'm due to start working on Skywatch again in about two weeks, but I hope to be far enough into Sanctuary by then that switching back and forth won't be a problem. Though they're VERY different books, so we'll see how that works. Maybe Skywatch on weekday and Sanctuary on weekends . . ? We'll see.