Getting Back on Track

Okay, so I've had a few delays this summer with my writing schedule. My boys were sick the first week of June, and then we took a family road trip the third week and I, unfortunately, did not get any real work done on The Oracle while we were visiting family in MN. (We did have a lot of fun, though). Driving 17 hours, and through the night nonetheless, does give one plenty of time to ponder plot, however, so I did get quite a bit of brainstorming done. I think it was sometime mid-Missouri in the middle of the night while all my boys (husband included) were sleeping that I figured out some pretty juicy details. My brain has always worked well late at night (or early in the morning, however you want to look at it), I often have a hard time falling asleep because my brain is so active after dark, so it was actually a pretty productive time for me. I also had the presence of mind to write down everything I came up with once we arrived at our friends' house. Aside from that, however, work on my book on the trip was nil. Okay, so taking stock of everything, I had about fifty pages completed when we left. In the five days that we've been home I have really put my nose to the grindstone to get back on track and I managed to write 28 pages. Unfortunately, that's not enough, so I have to pick up the pace. I figured out the math that if I am shooting for another 375 page novel, I need to write roughly 10 pages a day to finish by August 2nd when my teacher in-service begins. I could push the deadline back to finishing by the time school starts, though, which still puts me at about 7 pages a day. So let's just average things out to 7-10 pages a day. That's a little daunting, but I'll get it done. I'm through the most difficult portion of the writing, I think. My main characters are back in Alitheia and almost everything that needed to be re-introduced has been. I've also introduced a couple new characters that I'm pretty excited about and everything seems to be falling into place nicely for me to build to the real conflict of the story. I wrote a description of Tellius today, as he is at age 12, and, well, let's just say that adolescence is not always friendly. I should know, as I teach adolescents, and I get to observe their physical transformations. Some of them breeze through it, but it is really rough on others. I do have to say, though, sometimes the kids that look the most awkward through their adolescent years turn out to be the most attractive people in the end. *wink*