NaNoWriMo 2022 Day 21

I devoted a couple hours this morning to planning, now that I’m about 30,000 words in and know the characters a little better. I’m coming up on a branch point in my outline, so I wanted to be sure I knew which way I wanted to go. I plugged in the plot for the rest of the book into my Excel ‘loose’ beat sheet. Things look much more spread out, but that’s OK — it will keep a quick pace to drive through on beats.

I also revisited my heroine’s character arc, which is definitely secondary to the hero’s, to make sure that she will get an emotionally satisfying arc too. While the plot is focused around him, the actions also feed into her character growth nicely. I may wind up needing a little bit more for her at the climax, but since I’m only about a third of the way through, I’ll have a better feel when I get closer.

In my third mid-day work block, I wrote the next scene. It wrapped at only 900 words, and I am shooting for closer to 1500. I let it simmer for the rest of the afternoon, then hopped back on at five for another hour. I realized that it would be a great spot for some emotional backstory sharing. Working that into the scene brought it to 1600 — sweet.

My next scene is dependent on my revision of the first book — will she see her sister or not? I’ll need to decide one way or another whether to include her sister in the scene so I can write a draft. Nooo, I’m terrible at decisions! 😂