About Writing – The Personal Blog of Pace J Miller

It’s been a while since the last update on my fantasy novel.

Things had been going kind of slow as of late as I stunned myself into the realisation that I was more than halfway through my masters degree and there was only 3 months to go before final exams!  The exams are kind of on a collision course with the timetable I have set for myself to finish the first draft of the novel.  Not good.

Plus there’s been the NBA All-Star game, the trade deadline, AND the Oscars (including the ambitious goal to watch most of the nominees I could possibly get to, which I’m both surprised and frightened to say I achieved).  To say I’ve been a little distracted would be an understatement.

Nevertheless, I’ve been plodding along quietly, doing anything from 300 to 1,500 words a day (mostly in the lower region) while trying to shift the focus to my studies.  I finally decided to check the word count today, and I was somewhat shocked to see that it is now 77,000+ words.  I’d say in terms of the plot, I should be about a quarter of the way through.  Sadly though, in terms of the number of things I want the protagonist to do and the places I want him to go, I’m probably only about one-sixth through, if that.  Maybe that just means things will get a lot more exciting soon.

I had been stuck in a lull, feeling like things were moving along but not going anywhere.  It was kind of like my protagonists, who were trapped with the antagonist in a place filled with blood-sucking, skin-colour-changing, mutated/evolved elves.  Today, I finally managed to get them out of that dreaded place.  They escaped - sweaty, muddied and bleeding – at last.  Now hopefully, so can I – and get a move on with the story.

Another thing that has struck me is that I need to put more effort into distinguishing my characters.  Give them more obvious traits.  I want to keep them 3-dimensional but there’s a danger that they might end up bland and without distinctiveness.  That last thing I would want is for them all to seem the same.  The thing is, I’m not 100% sure what their personalities are like yet because I haven’t known them for all that long.  Perhaps that’s something I should worry about in the second draft.