The problem with kidnapping...

I have a perfectly legitimate excuse for not posting this weekend. Christmas celebration Saturday, as well as an after-Christmas sale mall shopping trip. Sunday, church and babysitting for six hour straight. Boom! There you have it. So. I apologize and here I am, posting, albeit a day or two late.

So, this week I let Annabelle's dad "kidnap" her, which isn't as easy as it sounds. When your character never leaves her house and can't barely walk, and the kidnapper isn't actually planning on committing a kidnapping, it's awfully difficult to form a situation in which it actually happens. But, hey, I did it. And now there's the problem of getting her unkidnapped again, which is proposing a whole new set of problems.

Why did I even need to kidnap her in the first place, you might ask? Does this have any sort of relevancy to the basic plot? And, in theory, yes it does. Because through the whole story she's had two main fears. 1) of never getting over Lyme and 2) of her dad finding her. And in every story the character, during the climax, should face his/her greatest fears, correct? So, I'm planning (let's see if it works) to have her face both of those fears simultaneously, hence the reason why I've conducted a kidnapping. (Plus, it happened in the first draft. The one that occurred before I even added Lyme disease in.)

Now my problems are: 1) I can't rescue her too fast, or that part would be useless. 2) I don't know quite what her dad's motivations are (that's always a problem) 3) I want some sort of fairy-tale typical rescue, since that's a reoccurring theme throughout the book 3a) this is sort of a problem since no one knows where she is and she happens to be constantly getting farther away by the moment. Anyone have tips?

In any case, I've started writing this story again after several week's break. Wish me luck!

Nothing much to report...

Still burnt out from NaNoWriMo. So...not much done this week. I finished dating all my previous chapters....wait. That sounded weird. Rephrased: During NaNoWriMo I just started a new page for new chapters. I just finished putting the dates at the top of all of them. I don't know if I've mentioned this already, but I figured that I should put dates at the tops of all the chapters because the story spans two years. That way I don't have to figure out how to integrate a bunch of awkward time transitions. Anyway, that's the extent of my work this week. I'm planning on working on it tomorrow. So excited! I've missed it a lot, as burnt out as I've been.

A couple of random things: 

1. Write This Book by Pseudonymous Bosch is a great writing book. It's simple, but funny and a very creative way to write a "how-to-write" book. 

2. I've designed a few more covers. I'm going to put up a few covers and put another poll on the sidelines. Feel free to vote! 

1. 

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8. 

Have fun! 

This'll be short...

As always, right? Well, this time I have a good excuse. I didn't get any writing done this week. Okay, maybe that's not so good of an excuse. I've got an excuse for that too. Finals. Yes, they're finally over and I can now focus on my writing. Wish me luck! Hopefully I'll have more to report next week. :)

Oh, and I've got a passage to share with you. Observe this and find the symbolism. Isn't it good? She talks about, in previous paragraphs, how her sisters were born at extraordinary times and were named things like Celestial Heavens and whatnot, after the times they were born.

There was the day that I arrived. At noon, on a day in September that could have been either spring or autumn, judging by the blueness of the sky. Or by the temperature, which was neither too hot nor too cold. A quiet, peaceful kind of day. The kind that, at its end, makes you wonder where the time has gone. A day that doesn't feel like a gift until it's done. For it’s only as you're drifting off to sleep that you realize how happy you are, how happy you'd been every moment you were awake.
It was on just such a day as this that I was born....My father bestowed a name he had long cherished: Annabelle, after his own mother...Then, mindful of my mother's feelings, he gave me the name of her mother as well. In this way, I became Annabelle Evangeline, and no sooner had my father proclaimed his that my mother... [announced] that she wished me to be known as Belle. I could...have a...name that...would match the Beauty I would surely become.
Allow me to set something straight at this point. There's nothing actually wrong with the way I look. I have long brown hair that generally does what I ask it to, except on very rainy days when it does whatever it wants. I have eyes of a deep chestnut color that are not set too far from each other so that I appear to look over my own shoulder, nor so close that they appear to be trying to catch each other's glance across the bridge of my nose. And there's nothing wrong with my nose, either, thank you very much. In fact, I have a face that is much like the day on which I was born. It contains neither too much of one thing, nor too little of another. A perfectly fine face. Just not an extraordinary face. 

From Belle by Cameron Dokey

Finally Over

Half an hour before December 1st, I am happy to say that I finished my 50,000 words. The book is by no means close to finished and I haven't even reached the climax, but I got a good chunk written of this book. In fact, that's the most I've ever written in a month. I got to know my character better and wrote a bunch of terrible scenes and some good-ish scenes that I may not have gotten by "regular grown-up means." That was an Anne Lamott quote, by the way. :) Between college classes, family obligations and getting behind nearly 6,000 words at the end, I actually got it done. Thank goodness I don't have a job yet. Which I'm seriously considering getting, because of a reason I'll probably post on my normal blog soon, once I've actually have time to post, which I'm hoping will be tomorrow after my exam...and practical.

Now that it's over, though, I'm finding, I lack the motivation to write. Maybe it's because I just wrote fifty-stinkin-thousand words and I'm all worn out. Maybe it's because now I don't have a goal. Maybe it's just because of finals this week. I'm literally taking an exam every other day and studying the days in between. Thus is the reason this is a short post, because I've got to study my butt off for two tests tomorrow. So much fun, right? What every the reason is, I'll overcome it and hopefully by the end of Christmas break, I'll be done. We'll see, though, won't we. Pray for me!