What do you do...

If your protagonist character gets into a conversation with the "bad guys", and they end up being pretty convincing and reasonable? Time to reconsider where your plot is going, maybe.

Shuffling Forward

21006 words. That makes pretty good progress, for me. I also scribbled away a little at the current Ran's Daughter illustration, finally getting something which isn't too horrible to contemplate posting. Now I just need to color it.

So, all in all, things are going well on the creative front.

I can't post an excerpt from last night's work, though, because it would either make no sense or be too revealing. I also can't post any artwork, because I'm embarrassed how slow my progress has been, and I want to have a sequence complete before I let others see it again.

What was nice about last night was the way, on the way to one scene, I found something else happening that I hadn't anticipated. I love it when the characters start taking control.

Twenty Thousand

Last night I finally broke twenty thousand words on the first draft of that novella I'm working on. I say it's a novella, because I expect to get about thirty-five to forty thousand words out of it. So, 20k is about half way.

It has been a month since I regained my enthusiasm for writing this thing. The past month I have, by my standards, been racing ahead. In that month, I have gotten down roughly eighty-five hundred words.

Eighty-five hundred words. Of first draft. In a month. At this rate, finishing the first draft will take nearly three months more, and then I have to let it sit for a month or two, and then revise it, so, let's say five months. It's going to be October before I can even show this to anyone else.

Of course, right now it's not even in a state where I want to show it to anyone. I'm worried that there's not enough meat. It seems to be rushing, and I'm not sure the set-pieces are working. Right now I'm coming up on writing a scene I've wanted to write for months, but now I'm scared. I'm scared that I'm driving the story to this scene just because I like the scene. I'm scared that what I see in my mind's eye doesn't actually translate to words. I'm scared that the scene isn't going to work.

Mid-novella crisis. I should buy a sports car or something.

Linda ran off the edge of the building, carrying us, out into the hollow air. I looked down at the street four stories down, and felt every inch of that distance slap me in the face. We seemed to hang there for eternity. I heard somebody whimper. I think maybe it was me.

Stupid Excel™ Tricks

Why does Excel make it impossible to know what cell is selected when the window is not active? I can understand feedback so that users don't get confused about where input is going, but I'd like to be able to select a cell in a sheet and then do something in another window, using the selected cell as a convenient place holder. Convenient, that is, if it wasn't invisible.