I didn’t post anything here yesterday. I hate to in it, but I dropped the ball. It was day one (again) of the “30 Day, 15 Minutes a Day” writing challenge.

My only justification is that I could tell that it wasn’t working, but it took me a while to figure out WHY. It simply wasn’t a story. It was a series of loosely-connected events without a focus.

Things that seemed to help me figure what needed to happen included:

• Moving from Microsoft Word to plain text, and finally moving each individual paragraph into Scrivener so I could move things around more easily. (I think this forced me to rethink the function of each paragraph…)
• Yesterday I did more detailed character work. (When I reread it today, I realized that neither my protagonist nor my antagonist had any goals. Today, I am so overwhelmed. I really need to go back to the beginning.)
• I need to add in sensory details.
• And… I know this is sort of backward, rethink the outline.

These are not exactly steps. I tend to do all of these at the same time, thoroughly confusing myself in the meantime.

On the other hand, I did turn in the book review for my church’s newsletter.