Writing from the lake

If you are in the U.S., happy Labor Day! If not, happy Monday! Today my wife and I went to Pineview Reservoir with her family. It was a full day of paddle boarding or just enjoying being on the beach today. I stayed on the beach because I really wanted to make some progress on the book.

Today was gorgeous out. It was in the high 80s (about 31 C for folks outside the US), there was a nice, soft breeze coming off the lake to keep us cool, and the sky was clear. It was a perfect day to spend at the lake. As you can see, my wife was enjoying herself!

It was a really good day that I feel very grateful to have had.

Book status

As you can see from the top picture, I spent my time writing old school today. I didn't want to bring anything electronic, so I grabbed a pen and a spiral notebook. I'm glad I did, because I think it helped me visualize some things today. I really had no idea where Mack and Wes were in a POW camp at. I knew that their home country was somewhere to the north. Having the pen and paper today turned out to be very handy, as it was easy to sketch out a quasi-map.

I don't think the details of the map will matter much for readers of the book, but at least it gave me a picture of where they were and where they needed to go. Part of me thinks it'd be cool to have someone create a map for me, but I'll worry about that later. If you look closely at the map, you'll see a dot to the south near some mountains with a P next to it. P in this case means POW camp. Those two have a long trip until they get home. Restaria is way up to the north and that's a rough trip when you are trying to escape hostile territory.

Yesterday I mentioned writing ugly and not worrying about it in the short term. Today was definitely full of ugly writing. First, you can see that my penmanship sucks, so my writing was literally ugly today. Second, I'm struggling with this chapter some. This is more like a prologue chapter. It introduces Malcom "Mack" Hawthorne and Wes Dearnly to us and establishes something about their characters. However, it's really not where the story is going to happen, so I don't want to get too bogged down into it. Make it interesting, yes. But not make it a book about to escaped POWs getting home. (Though that could be an interesting story too.)

Here's the problem with today's writing. I managed to give us some more info about Wes. I still need to fill in a bit more about him, but not much. He's a scout. He's good at stealth and he knows how to evade the enemy. He's a handy person to have while you are escaping. However, Mack is the main protagonist and I don't have a strong enough intro to him yet. Perhaps I'll get some ideas on how I want to do this when I transfer my scribbling in a notebook to electronic document. I really only need to do that and one more thing to introduce a new character. Then they will largely be done with Magerak.

I think my main lesson from today was to write however and whenever I could. No, it is not easy to write in a semi-comfortable chair with lots of distraction around me. But I got some more done and some details were firmed up in my mind. That was valuable and I'll take it.