Day 16

Made my quota, 2,240 words, but tough tough day today. Mostly working on a single scene, a key one for this part of the book, that introduces two of the three key characters, has all three interacting for the first time, and with my having to achieve the right balance between romance, humour, and sudden, explosive violence. The scene is premised on a ticking timebomb type deadline, that only two of the characters know about, and a complete misunderstanding of what is going on by the third character, for whom the whole thing is alternately terrifying and infuriating.

My problem as the author is that when I get the pacing right for the humour, the violence falls apart. When I work out the logic of the violence, the romance becomes kind of icky. If I beef up the romance, it becomes too explicit and flops. If I tone it down, it vanishes altogether, because, did I mention the implicit violence? It's one of those situations that has its own internal logic, but keeping track of what each character is reacting to second by second, and getting that down on paper correctly, without making the scene so long and overdrawn as to collapse under its own weight...well, this writing business is HARD. But then one of the points of doing this NaNoWriMo exercises is to place myself in this situation -- I write a lot of reviews taking potshots at various authors for their sloppy writing, so it is important to walk a mile in their shoes once in a while to be a little more sympathetic for just how hard this all is.