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Yesterday, I only managed to get 3 pages down. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s a tricky setting/scene, taking place during the time Odil is in prison, and gets a bit violent. Add the fact that it’s the prologue, so I have a limited amount of space to give the most impact and justification of the scene, and the job of writing it got a little more tricky. I swiped this quote from Karen Templeton, where there’s a big discussion about The RITAs over on AAR:

My first books were written almost purely on instinct, a state I often wish I could recapture. But in order to keep writing -- since instinct alone rarely sustains any writer for long -- I had to learn the craft, how to make conscious choices that would make the prose tighter, a character's motivation clearer, the emotions leap off the page. . . how to recognize when a scene/character/passage isn't working, and why, and then how, to fix it.

That’s what I’m up against, making those *conscious choices* to make the prologue do it’s job. Don’t bother suggesting writing the draft first, I’m an edit as I go writer. I’ve never just fiddled because I’m wasting time, or trying to perfect something. Yes, that ‘perfecting’ urge is there, but it’s pretty easy to move on if that were only the case. If I’m stalling, there’s a reason for it, and the reason needs to work it’s way up from the subconscious level, so I can fix it.

The good news is, this story now feels *right* on a gut level. I’m totally hooked into the characters. I can see and hear them (the way they move/react) in any situation I envision them in now. And it doesn’t take much to come up with that first layer of below-the-surface emotions, fears, motivation, that ring true. It’s such a relief to not to have that wandering-around-blind feeling anymore.

So today is scale mountains of laundry day—and that means trekking down to the Laundromat—
but the prologue should be finished today, and a start made on chapter one.