Centaurs courting in the woods in Minnesota. No telling what you will find on a walk through the woods!
We’re switching out days so my granddaughter can get more preschool stuff (she’s only 2), but at her daycare they’re teaching the alphabet and numbers on Mondays and Tuesdays. Her parents and I are also, but it doesn’t hurt to have all the reinforcement. That means I’ll have a WHOLE 7 days of no toddler babysitting after today. And HOPEFULLY, I can finish this book in those 7 days.
I took the picture of the candy store at the mall. I thought about using one of the Daz3d creations with a child in a vintage outfit, but I hadn’t used this image yet with the girl, the dog and the frog and thought it would be cute.
I’m off to write. I was doing a lot of filling in blanks on the story yesterday, a necessary part of the writing process, but only managed to get 1500 words instead of my 2,000. But, I made minimum word count for the book. Yay! I did have my granddaughter over here also and that took away from writing for part of the day.
Now I just have to finish the story. I started re-reading from the beginning again to see what other blanks I need to fill in, the things I need to change because of other changes, and how I’m going to end the story.
I’ve never had dogs that gulp down their food like these two do. Though it may be because I always had A dog, and not two at the same time. My other dogs had their food out all day and ate when they needed to.
These two are like furry little piranhas. I feed them twice a day and they want more, more, more. I do feed them vegetable snacks and that helps. I should feed myself vegetable snacks!
I’m off to write. Labor Day for me means Labor. I wrote 2,000 yesterday, 2 of my harder scenes. Have 2 more of those and have to finish the story. I’m 1,000 away from minimum word count! And I said I’d take care of my granddaughter for a couple of hours, which means several this afternoon, so I need to get going before I can’t.
Yesterday, I mentioned how I had a thought in the morning about how I needed to add something earlier in the story. But that wasn’t enough. I ended up adding a prologue too. What good are prologues? Some editors will say: take them out. No one reads them.
But prologues can show a setup of what is to come, subtly, why someone is the way they are–a tragedy. It MUST be important to the story. It MUST show something that is critical to the telling of the story that will be so much better if it is SHOWN, not mentioned throughout the story, trying to make a point. I read a story that had the main character, the protagonist, die. What? So I had to start again with chapter 1, searching for the main character. Someone I could root for. It was near the end of the book that I learned the significance of the prologue. Not good. By then, I didn’t care. I’d read the prologue so long ago, it didn’t matter.
I’ve noticed in movies and TV series the need to insert “flashbacks” or like prologues in the middle of stories. My dad would never be able to follow. He couldn’t watch them any more if he was still alive. To me, it’s so overdone constantly, that it pulls me out of the story. I’m like, NO! Quit making me time-travel in the middle of the story! That’s what a flashback is. Briefly, it can share something that happened in the past, but it can also pull readers out of the current story. Show it at the beginning. Let me see what happened in the beginning, and then let me get on with the story as it is today. Just my two cents.
I do want to see what has made the person the one they are today, but earlier, so that when all this other stuff happens and he or she reacts, I’ll know where they’re coming from. To me, it makes the character so much deeper.
Okay, before I write 4,000 words on my blog, I’m off to another horribly hot day. Best to stay in and write at least 3,000 words to reach my minimum word count required on the story.
