the first day of the rest of the draft

"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The next stage of drafting: begun!

1667 words down today, spelling out the opening moments of Part Three, in my enormous, ever-continuing novel. 1667. A little over five pages. Not bad. Not great.

We could use more scenery--my poor characters dance around on a blank stage. But then, I always write like that. I get facial expressions and dialogue and protagonist thoughts first, and only later think about what she's looking at, what it smells like there, how the air feels.

Still, the first scene is down, the first hurdle is over, and I remember that I'm not a scene-planner after all, but a writer. How nice.

Though, in the first days of a draft, I always half-expect my characters to roll their eyes at me. "Why should I do that?" I can hear them say.

"Because I said so" doesn't go nearly as far with rebellious characters as I would hope.

What I'm most excited about: my protagonist, E., showed up today. She's sitting in the corner as I write this, throwing out sassy opinions about her lot in the novel's life. But she earned the right to be snarky: she had her first verbal sparring match with the Antagonist today, and poor E didn't exactly win.

But the chocolate-raspberry truffles I had waiting outside her trailer? All gone. So that's a little compensation, at least.

(She's very smug about how the Antagonist only received celery sticks.

... At least, that's what I told E.)