Making Mythology #amwriting
Wow, it’s the last week of April. It’s not looking like I’m going to reach my Camp NaNoWriMo goal. You might think, “What?! But Loni, you only set out to do 5K in MaTisha and LaTonya’s POVs for book 2. You should’ve been able to do that!”
I know, I know. But… I’m a squirrel. *shrug*
Okay, so if I haven’t been working on my Camp NaNo goal, what have I been working on? Glad you asked!
As soon as April 1st hit, my brain dashed off to figure out why a particular character from Book 4 (call him B) would leave home and hide from his twin sister for over a century. It had to be bad enough that she wouldn’t relent in her hunt and their older brother could blackmail B with threats of telling the sister where he was. But at the same time, it couldn’t be so bad that they couldn’t reconcile after a century long chase. I worked on a plan, showed it to my husband who immediately got hung up on a totally unrelated detail in which he told me this other character was a horrible person who needed to die (*clears throat*), and spent the night wallowing in self-pity. Then the next day, I revised my plan and bounced it off of my husband and sis-in-law, tweaked it a bit more, and called it good. *thumbs up*
And then taxes… Good grief! If it were up to my husband, we would’ve gotten them done some time ago. But we were waiting on my K-1 and it wasn’t until a week before they were due that I realized I was doing the business taxes, which led to panic-stricken tears, much freaking out, and wine. Lots of wine. I got them done three whole days before they were due (Yay!) and when the shaking finally subsided, I kind of just sat there in a state of stupor for a while.
B’s story returned after that and, with a plan at my back and inspiration in my head, I busted out 6500 words and finished his pre-book 3.5/4 story. Woot! I’ve since revised it down to under 6K, and I’m happy with it. For now.
With that out of my head and more than half of my month gone, I returned to my original goal of writing 5K in MaTisha’s or LaTonya’s POV. I stared at my screen for a while, chomped on a few nuts, and realized what I had already written just wasn’t going to work. So, I threw it out (or at least cut it and pasted it in a document titled “Removed from Book 2”). With that gone, I returned to a previous version where this one guy wasn’t a total jerk right off the bat, and therefore MaTisha could return to the palace without much delay to discuss what to do about the monsters. But in order to defend against the monsters, I needed to know how the different powers affected each other.
My squirrely side refused to sit still. It wanted to figure out how everything within my world fit together. Thus I dove back into my world’s mythology.
I knew there were two sides. They needed each other in order to exist, yet they were always destroying each other. Like life and death. You can’t really have the existence of life without death, or death without life. Yet death is the ending of life and life is the ending of death. After a long walk with my sis-in-law where we discussed all the different nuances I wanted in my world, she provided the balance I was looking for.
I have two primary powers, opposite to each other, but not defined as one particular side. They are both creation and chaos. When the two powers collide, bits of energy break off, forming two groups of beings, each group dominant in their originating power but possessing a fraction of the other. This helped me explain the existence and relationships of the seven or eight groups of people I’ve defined for my world. I documented it on my secret organization website (other people have those, right?) and returned to my story.
Now I’m down to the wire. I’ve got 4 days, if I include today, to get down another 3800 words. I’m hoping to write a large chunk after I take my daughter to the dentist tomorrow. We shall see.
Oh, but I do have good news. We’re doing a Goodreads Giveaway for a paper copy of The Ancient by The Seven! The giveaway opens today, so if you want a chance to win, be sure to enter!
What has your April been like? Have you developed a mythology for your world before? Do you get easily distracted from your projects or do you have the self-discipline to stick with only one thing until it’s done?
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