NaNo – Day 4, When Characters Take Over

I think my internal editor went out for coffee and hasn't returned yet. I managed to amass 3349 words tonight in one fell swoop. And I feel like I can go onward. The strange thing was I could see the scene in my head and just wrote it as fast as I could. I heard Bob the Editor echoing in my head, "Needs to be cut", which is true, but at last now I know how the male protagonist managed to make his way to the big city, small child in tow.

My goal was to get them to the city in tonight's writing. I got them to the city, settled in an Inn, and off to the public baths before I needed a breather. For conflict there is the magical child stealing food in a city that frowns heavily on overt displays of magic. My protagonist doesn't want to land in jail, get tossed from his guild, or drop the child down a sewer, so he is a bit tense right now. Good place to leave him.

I'll be switching back to the female protagonist. Or maybe inserting a bit of the villain's POV. The liberating thing here is that I can always drop it later, but I'll know what the villain did and said. The scary part is writing later on and thinking I told something, when I actually had to cut it. Should be interesting to pull it all together in another draft after this.

Of course, while all this is going on, my poetry suffers. My output the past three weeks has been miniscule. Of course, since I have submissions out, I go into a small hibernation mode until I either hear something, or can dump the submissions from my mind. To counter the submissions lethargy, I gave myself assignments. Then the other day, a few more calls for submissions fell out of the sky that seem tailor made for a couple of poems I've been revising. Maybe I just work better under pressure. The only time my word output was as much as this was when I was writing 40 page papers for grad school. But in those, I actually had to make sense...