What They're Saying

It has been fun to rediscover that once I start working on a project, the characters will come out of hiding and start talking to me.  I've done roughly 1600 new words and continued to work on my timeline and organization. This time around more of them are talking, rather than the chatty main character. I discovered over the last couple of weeks that my secondary character is using an assumed name! That was interesting but has created a real problem writing it.

Think of it. He's using an assumed name that some characters know but the bad guys don't. I have people talking about him and other's talking to him. I'm now in a quandary as to how to address this problem. It never occurred to me really. I mean, I've always referred to him one way, knowing he was "hiding" but never considering that he was using a fake name. It is very sad when a character is smarter than you. And a bit annoying. Had I thought about it I'd probably questioned how he hides from them in plain sight. Anyway, he's presented me with an interesting problem. 

My female character has also become more vocal. About time, thank you very much. She's having some interesting interactions with the antagonist that were unexpected. This helps as her scenes are far too sparse in the first half of the story and too many in the later half.

Doug told me about an app for his phone and at the last writer's meeting he shared it with me. I downloaded it this week. I really like it, even though I've only used it once for what I wanted it for. It is called. ListNote.  It lets you speak your notes, converts them to text and... drum roll please, then lets you email it to yourself. 

How is this helpful? At 1 a.m. one of my characters got chatty. I grabbed my phone, brought up ListNote and dictated the scene into the app. It became text and I emailed it to myself. Next day, I dropped it into my story. Viola'. Perfect. Yes, I had to do some editing. Quotation marks, some punctuation marks because I hadn't figured out how to do it with speech (you say "question mark" to get one), and formatting, all of which I'd have had to work on when I typed it in anyway. Overall, I was very pleased with it. A few more trial runs and we'll see it continues to appeal to me. 

So, my writing week has gone rather better than I expected but not as well as I'd hoped.Seems my accountability agreement with my friend, Doug is working. Overall, a good writing week. Haven't had that for a long time.