Day Thirty-three - 63,051 words and counting

I'm writing a novel. All my progress can be found on my private blog. The commentary for each day's work can be found below.

I've arrived at one of the tricky and frustrating times in this whole process. As I've mentioned before, I've got an outline of the next few chapters--my way of seeing a little way ahead into the fog. I've just finished a minor arc--what happened on Bryony's first Freeday. Now, that part is over, and it's time to begin the next minor arc.

I always seem to get bogged down on these transitions. It's like I'm a 4x4 truck reaching the bottom of one slope and trying to get up the next. I always feel like I'm about to slam down nose first, and it takes a while before my wheels get traction to start dragging me up again.

The thing is, I know precisely what the next arc is, but I just can't launch right into it. I need a kicker, an event that will launch me into it. First off, I need a short time jump, and that means exposition. There's a couple of different ways I can carry that off.

First is an actual expository passage that summarizes the intervening time before picking up with narrative. Another possibility is to begin in the narrative and indicate through internal exposition that time has passed. I can carry a lot of stuff out through dialogue, and in general, I think that would be the better way to do it.

Also, Bryony has to be driven to do what she's about to do (not telling!), and that means going through official channels first, and being denied. Okay, I'm picturing two scenes before the next minor arc gets going. First, the "hiding the exposition" scene where I turn playing catchup into character development, and then the "trying to play by the rules" scene, probably with Jorik--it's been a while since we saw him, now.

I'm guessing that's probably a chapter's worth of material, which bumps forward my outline by a whole chapter. No problem there. My guess is that the setup for this arc will be 16, and it will stretch out through 17 and 18.

After that, there's only one more minor arc to Part 1, and it ought to shake things up. And just to mess with you, it will raise a bunch of questions that I will not immediately answer! I've been watching too much LOST, I think.

Okay, I think I know how to begin. I'm getting traction. Let's go.

Well, I didn't expect Bryony to go astrally projecting, but there you go. I realized that she was in precisely the correct frame of mind to do that, according to the magic system I had already devised, and it would have been wrong not to send her on a midnight mental romp.

Why did she forget? That's something that I will spell out in the story later, but I'll state it here now, so I can make sure I'm consistent later.

The human brain stores sense memory, at least according to the world of this story. Those senses might be the obvious ones like vision and sound, or more subtle ones like the chemicals in the brain that are associated with emotion. But it is the soul that remembers how those experiences mold and change us, and it is the soul that remembers magic.

While awake, Bryony does not have the ability (yet) to access what her soul remembers directly. She can only view it through the filter of her body, a body which has no idea how to interpret that kind of memory. And so she forgets it. But it is still there.

Are you sniffing onto the origins of her amnesia? Nice try. Yes, all of this stuff is related, but it's only a small piece of the explanation. Keep sniffing.

I really like how the chapter is turning out so far. I'm not sure if tomorrow will finish out Chapter 16 or not, but I should get pretty close.

Note: I apparently added wrong at some point along the line. I did a word count on the whole story, and found I was actually three words further along than I thought. Starting today, I have updated the total word count accordingly.

Today's Total: 1,761 / 1,689 words (104.3%)
Nov. Progress to Date: 3,824 / 3,378 words (113.2%, 0.3 days ahead)
Nov. Total Progress: 3,824 / 50,670 (7.5%)
Est. Completion: 63,051 / 250,000 words (25.2%, 111 days to go)