I’m working on my epic fantasy proposal. The other day I was whining to Michelle Sagara that epic was hard and I was rambling and meandering and babbling and boring all the readers to tears, I could just tell…
…and she said, “So: in other words, you’re writing.”
*laughs* Yeah, well. I’m writing. And I’m used to writing urban fantasy, which is quite fast-paced, so I went into this kinda thinking “yeah okay first major beat will probably be around 5K words” and now I’m 16.3K in and, er, still several thousand words away from it.
Which is partly the fault of this totally unplanned character who wandered onto the page and hung around for two thousand words, thoroughly establishing herself. I was like, “…it’s not that I object to you being here, but WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY BRAIN THAT YOU’RE EVENTUALLY GOING TO PAY OFF?!” Because it’s a pay-off kind of character; she’s not just there to fill in one wee scene.
So I get out of that scene and I move on to the next one and the characters are taking on lives of their own, because I’m sitting there typing and thinking “Really? You’re doing that? Really? Because…because that’s not going to go down well, this is gonna need some spin…really, guys? Really?”
I’m aiming for another 15K or so on this by the end of the month, at which point it gets polished up & sent to the agent, but I gotta say, right now I don’t know if I’m even gonna hit that big beat by 30K and heaven knows what these characters are planning…