Sad

When I was a girl my uncle took, my mother, my sister, and myself to go see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in theaters. Two weeks later when my father came home from a trip for work, my uncle took us to see it again, this time with my dad.

Shortly thereafter, I wrote a piece of fan fiction. I don't remember what I wrote, but I do remember four important details about it. One, it was based on the movie. Two, I didn't remove the part when Han and Leia kissed even though I was only eight. Three, it was the first thing I ever wrote that I completed. And four, my teacher read it, made a couple of corrections, and gave me extra credit for writing it. It was pretty long for my age, somewhere around ten pages.

This morning my husband told me nothing was really happening in the news. A few minutes later I got on the computer. "What do you mean nothing is happening?" I thought very loudly in my head, "Carrie Fisher died this morning."

RIP Ms. Fisher. You inspired an untold number of girls to strive to be all they can.

The Problem with Writing Good Characters

I have a ton of plans for future books.  The problem is all of my plans involve characters from previous stories.

So it works like this, I wrote Jake and Stephanie's story. I enjoyed it a lot. But each of his brothers now need a story. And that means Jake's friend Paolo needs a story.  Then each member of Jake's youngest brother Dan's SEAL team needs a story.

It snowballs from there.

Another example would be my baseball series which also stemmed from Jake's story. Though that was I planned to make 9 books. One for each position. And then the character I was going to get rid of, I've decided to redeem so it's going to be 10.  Oh but then I decided I needed to redeem another character so it's going to be 11.

That's the issue I'm having right now with Zack and Cassie's story. I love their story. But it's made me think about some other characters and now I want to write their stories too. Cause Cassie's uncle has a story. So does Zack's mother. Zack's friend Josh and of course Zack's teammate Anthony have stories. And if I'm going to do their stories, then I have to do Cassie's friend Suzy.

Yeah, I have a problem.

So if you ever have a chance to read one of my stories, know there's likely going to be another story in the series at some point.

Go write!

And Yet Another NaNo Is Gone

Well November went by entirely too fast for me. I got 50,000 words, but just barely and I'm really glad I made a ton of notes.

I'm still working on The Bear and The Maiden. I'm enjoying it but there is a lot of football to learn about so that some scenes make sense. That's where my husband has been awesome.

He was very excited to be diagramming football plays for me on Sunday. It was adorable.

He played in high school and was a nose tackle. Unfortunately he didn't get to play much and when he did play he'd found out his main goal was to cause chaos so he didn't bother to learn the playbook for his school. They told him where he needed to be and where he needed to go and he happily went about crashing into people.

It was hilarious to hear him talk about it.

So I have a little bit of time before I have to head to a nail appointment, I think I'm going to work on Zack and Cassie's story.

Remember a terrible first draft, is more done than a non-existent draft.