Monday, 30 September 2002

My vacation is over. I was back at work today.

It wasn't too bad.

Yesterday I wrote a scene from the middle of the novel. With my short stories, I usually write things pretty much in sequence as it goes in the story. That's not to say that I don't go back and add stuff (quite common) or rearrange things (fairly rare), but sequential is usually the order of the day. But this scene was clear in my head, and it started to bug me, so I just wrote it. I may end up writing other scenes out of order, if they start to bug me the way that one did.

Out-of-order writing seems to make sense, even if I don't do it often. The only way it would give difficulty would be if I couldn't resist the urge to rewrite and produce polished prose. Since odds are I'll end up having to change it quite a bit to make it blend smoothly in with the text before and after, all but the most basic polishing would probably be a big waste of time. As it happens, though, I didn't have any urge to polish, so that was good.

Today I finished up my expanded chapter 1, now at about 10 pages or about 2500 words.

I've started in on the new chapter 2. Just 100 words or so, but I've got a pretty good idea how it goes from here. It'll be fun one to write.