Dream Journal: Itineraries

Two very vivid dreams last night, both featuring close friends. The first one is for thread_walker's ears only. The second one involved a trip that scotica and xrian and I were going on to see a museum exhibit in some other city. We'd made separate travel arrangements so we weren't sitting together on the plane. When I got off in Chicago, I was walking down long corridors to get to the rental car (or something) and realized that the others weren't with me. Whereupon I suddenly got very insecure about whether I was even in the right city -- maybe I was supposed to have flown to NY or Boston instead. Pulled out the iPhone to Google the exhibition and check, but the connection wasn't working and when I tried to phone my friends the phone started talking back to me so I couldn't tell whether anyone was on the line.

I think the second dream is reminding me that I need to make my Kalamazoo arrangements Real Soon Now. (The first one was even more transparent, when it comes to it.)

Fun with Book 2

So I'm passing the time while waiting for Daughter of Mystery to age sufficiently for another editing pass (and to allow the test-readers time to review) by plunging into the sequel, The Mystic Marriage. This time there's no need to fake myself out with the myth that it's a "writing process experiment" -- now it's time to take the things that worked from that experiment and apply them. So ... what worked?

1. Write something every day. Don't lose momentum.
2. General advance plotting is ok, but don't visualize scenes in detail any further ahead than a couple days writing. If I've got a clearly detailed scene in my head, go ahead and scribble it down but avoid jumping around, which leads to ...
3. Start at the beginning and continue through to the end. Don't worry too much about going back and fixing things if they get changed -- that can be done later.

The major structural differences so far are that I have a much stronger idea of what the overall plot structure is going to be, while still having enough unmapped territory to allow unanticipated sub-plots to slip in. And rather than alternating between two point-of-view characters, I'm ending up with four: the two continuing POV characters from Book 1 and the two characters whose romance this book is about. (They both appear in Book 1 -- to some extent #2 grew out of the question, "Who would be fun to write more about and who deserves to get their own romance?") When I get to Book 3 (for which I have only an idea of a theme) I'll need to re-think this progression! I think I have the overall layout of the chapters sketched out, although I'm willing to toss it out if things go sideways.

Let's hope this one is as fun to write as the last.