It's the weekend!
I have a few things to do over the weekend, but I'm hoping to get a decent amount of writing time in too. I'm also planning to take next Friday off work so I have a full day to write. I think once I've done that, and had the weekend after, I'll be pretty close to being done with the draft, if not finished.
It's been a long journey with this book. I had the first inkling of the characters and their story when I was finishing up the final draft of Standing Too Close. It took a while for the details to really come together, but I think I started writing sometime in 2020. I got a few chapters in and then lost confidence for some reason. I think because of the main character being mute. Writing a character who doesn't talk is challenging, especially for a writer like me who tells so much of the story through dialogue.
So I stopped working on it. I wrote Guide Us during NaNo that year (or maybe it was 2021, I can't remember) and didn't exactly forget about Harley and Wolfe, but left them where they were. I wrote the first draft of Guide Us in about 8 days, so it needed a lot of work to get it ready to be seen by anyone. So it wasn't until earlier this year I managed to get back to A Stranger to Kindness and realized I was ready to write this book now.
So I have. Almost, anyway. Not all of it has come out exactly the way I wanted it to, but there is room to write more and to polish things, change them, rewrite them. And I will do all that. I just need to finish the book first.
Oh, and I have started publishing some of my flash fiction and short stories over on Medium. I figure they should have a life outside my hard drive, even if most of them are little prompt-driven exercises I write during my lunchbreaks at work - I give myself 30 minutes to write a story in 1,000 words or less using prompts from a writing website I use.
It challenges me to write outside my usual lane sometimes, and other times it give me a chance to explore characters from my books in a new context. I don't often use much of what I write in these stories as part of the book, but it's a way to really bed into a character voice or to look at a scene or situation through a different character's eyes.
Check out the stories I've posted here. I'll put a new one up every Friday.
What are you celebrating this week?
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