I’ve finished the opening scene for the novella, but there’s another ‘interlude’ between that scene and the point where the original draft started.  I’m currently debating how much I should reveal about what the character’s experiencing, and how aware she is of what’s going on around her . . .  In any case, I’ve added eight pages so far, and a lot of it may get cut out (which is how it usually works!).  And I’m happy that I ended up with a little homage to Ray Bradbury in the opening scene, including a quote from The Martian Chronicles.

I’ve decided that my ‘thank you gifts’ for Write-a-thon pledges will be weekly excerpts from the novella in progress for anyone who donates $5 or more, and a copy of my published short story, “The Memory of Trees” for anyone who donates $10 or more.  (So far I have one nice pledge, but from someone who already gets to see everything I write . . . !)  And I’m still spending way too much time picking over this website and trying to learn how to do things in WordPress . . .

I think I should have included getting this website set up as one of my goals for the Write-a-thon, as I’ve probably spent more time on it this week than on writing my novella.  Just getting this site to look more or less how I want it has taken a lot of trial and error.  And after trying half a dozen plug-ins for fonts, I still don’t have anything that really works; I’m surprised that the ability to choose any font you want for any part of a website isn’t just a standard feature of any site building application, but evidently it’s more complicated than it seems.

But I did get some work in on the opening scene of the novella.  I think most writers agree that beginnings and endings are the hardest; for me, endings aren’t usually so troublesome, but beginnings can definitely be a challenge to get right.  In this story, I needed to add quite a bit more to the rough, dream-like opening I’d previously written, because it’s necessary to create a clear sense of the protagonist’s world and her life in order for what happens to her to have the appropriate impact.   It’s not the kind of thing where I can weave in that information as the story goes along; if the reader doesn’t know who she was before, the shock and confusion she’s feeling is not going to be understood.  The tricky thing is to do this without taking too long to get to the ‘meat’ of the story . . .

A couple of years ago a friend offered to build a website for me, but, as so often happens, we both got busy with other things and it never happened.  Because I’m participating in this summer’s Clarion West Write-a-thon, and I wanted a venue to post updates on my progress, I decided it was time to put something together.  For now it’s a fairly rudimentary version of the site, functioning primarily as my Write-a-thon blog.

I’ve heard great things about the Clarion workshops for years, and some of my favorite authors have been involved with them.  The Write-a-thon is a kind of ‘shadow workshop’ to encourage writers to challenge themselves to accomplish their writing goals during the same six-week period as the actual workshop, and it’s also a fundraiser for the program.  To donate–or just to see what it’s all about–please visit the Clarion West site.