And then everything blows up...

I wrote about 900 words on chapter six just now, took one look at the last page, and said, "This is done." And strangely enough, it was. It's odd how chapters just end on you like that sometimes, but it did, and I'm hardly complaining. It's my shortest chapter yet, at just under 2,400 words, or just over seven typed, doubled-spaced MS Word pages for those of you who don't think word counts are very telling. But it ended where it ended, and so be it.

Faren isn't talking to me, just so you know. I lost his voice somewhere along the way (probably when I stopped talking to him all the time), and now I can't seem to get it back. I should probably go reread some of my earlier chapters and attempt to regain some semblance of character voice.

And Gem decided, apparently, to have a nervous breakdown this chapter. Which was not in my plans. And no one was around to tell her to suck it up, and Faren is too darn nice, and you know what? I really just want them to get to Kermia (Gem's soon-to-be hometown) already. Really, I do. But there's all this STUFF that has to happen before then, but in the first draft I attempted they were already in Kermia by this point so now I'm just confused. I think what I'm going to do is go back and reread all my previous chapters to get an idea of what I'm doing now before forging ahead. But still, I am proud of myself for writing so much in the past few days.

And now I should probably go call my friend who I meant to call earlier but didn't. Because I am, apparently, and idiot.

Hum de dum...

I actually made some real progress today. Almost 1,200 words, 700 of which were on Chapter Six, since I have now finished Chapter Five. I really need to start remembering the whole "show don't tell" rule. It really helps my scenes flow instead of stopping every five seconds because I'm so unhappy with what I've written. But I'm still kind of doing that, anyway. It's hard, sometimes, to remember it's a first draft and everything does not have to be perfect.

Plus, I keep getting new novel ideas that are very, very distracting. Really need to stop doing that.