A Fortnight to Write

At my real job I've been stuck in this cycle of not using all my vacation time in the actual year in which it was generated.  As a result of this, I have two weeks worth of 2010 vaction time left over to use this year, and I am smack in the middle of week one (week two is to follow consecutively).

While I do have some other very important things to which I need to attend during this time, most of this period is earmarked as writing time.  The primary writing priority is in making a lot of headway in a rewrite and expansion of my NaNoWriMo novel, A Separate Breed.  As I was outlining the abandoned plotlines that needed closure and the extra background that needed to be added in order for certain characters to make more sense, I think I realized that they would not be adequate to give the book the additional length it would require.  I was stewing about this a bit on Monday as I made some changes to the first draft of the manuscript, trying to figure out what else there could be.  Was my story really that thin?

My writing style tends toward concision.  I'll never be someone to write 800 page novels or 10 book series.  I usually know what I want to say and I say it.

When I was finishing the first draft of the book back in November I had seen a news article that gave me an idea for a "next step" plot point.  It would have expanded upon the main situation of A Separate Breed in a logical way, but I didn't have time to include it and I wanted the story to be finished before the November 30 deadline.  So I shelved it, figuring I could use it in a potential follow-up novel.

Silly me.  That bonus bit of story, along with my other outlined items, is where my extra 25 to 35 thousand words are coming from.  No need to panic!  So now my original climax gets to just be a precursor to the real thing.

And we're supposed to be getting something like a half foot of snow tomorrow here in Toronto.  Blech.  This is really going to interfere with my scouting mission to an area of the city I need to write about.

Weather notwithstanding, this is my fortnight to write!