Well, this makes for a nice change. I haven’t posted a 10:10am blog post in quite a long time now, not least as I have struggled more and more with my energy levels in the morning even when I chain early targets. I didn’t sleep last night, so that in its own strange way helped, as it allowed me to be awake at 9am, which is about the time I tend to go ‘OK, you can treat this as a new day now’, and let myself write. And you know what? While I wouldn’t be in a rush to repeat this any time soon – I’m already starting to flag a bit – I have to say that the content I wrote to hit target today was one of my favourite scenes in this whole first draft, perhaps across the entire Horizon trilogy. And it turns out, that’s because it puts character relationships as the foreground, against the background of events.
I do not know why I don’t seem to learn this lesson every time it comes up: I am happiest writing about characters experiences, that just so happen to occur in stories. I like having the framework of narrative structure there, but mostly so I have all the opportunities to show the varied life of the characters. If I actually enjoyed writing stream-of-consciousness fiction – I don’t – then I’d be pretty darn good at it. This is however you frame it though, a win, as I think that’s how I should approach my deep edit of the whole series when I get to that later this year. Put the people and their relationships first, and let the narrative be the framework, not the focus.
Also, as predicted, NHO hit 80k. It’s a special milestone, as I doubt it will hit 90k, so this is the home stretch now. And I gotta be honest, I think this is the one bit of the whole trilogy I feel in any way confident about. Famous. Last. Words.
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