Progress - Day 3

It's been a frustrating day. However, I've managed to write my 1000 words a day and now have 3300 down. I've written the 3 murder scenes I wanted and beefed up a bit more of one of the protagonists but I'm still feeling my way around the resolution of the plot. There is so much about these characters that I don't know yet but slowly they're emerging from the recesses of my mind and making themselves more visible to me.

I wanted to have a different kind of sleuth who solves the case with his/her side-kick, so came up with idea of two people in different countries with nothing in common who come together because of the murders. I feel today as if I've set myself an impossible task because I now have to create two worlds as well as that of the murderer. It feels overwhelming right now, but I know that if I take things a scene at a time then I'll get through it. And it doesn't matter if things don't work, I'll change them.

When I first started writing I used to be really precious about what I'd written and was reluctant to ditch anything. I've folders and folders of hand-written stuff in my study that I never look at, that are the result of that mentality. Some day I'll go through them and get rid of anything I can't develop. The beauty about having a computer is that I can save different versions, cut and paste or simply delete what I don't like; much more economical and freeing.

I also used to re-read everything I'd written before writing any more. This seemed to make sense at the time because everything was newly created and not etched properly in my memory. I didn't want to make mistakes, like using the wrong names or getting the sequence of events in the wrong order. Which is all very well but it slows you down and stops you from writing the new stuff. Now I only allow myself the last sentence, which I leave incomplete, before I continue.

Now I really must shut this down and switch off my brain otherwise I'll be spending a sleepless night worrying about the dam plot again. Night, night.