2,100 words today

An okay day. I had to keep looking at my notes though to get back in the story, maybe because I took the last two days off. I never take days off from thinking about the story, trying to figure out how I will end it, etc. But I take two days off from the actual writing.

I'm in a bit of a difficult part again, and the further I get into the story the more I see how my story needs to tie together with pieces in the beginning. It's great when I realize I foreshadowed something without even realizing it.

The last few books I've read lately make me realize that my setting in the story is vague. I think I'm doing okay with the houses, restaurants, etc., but it's the city in the background that I realize I'm being very vague about. That's okay. I have a whole list of things that will need to be altered already, and now I realize that instead of finishing a draft and then having much less of it after revising and editing (I was thinking 80%) , I might actually have more. And that's okay too.

I'm having so much fun though. It's become a serious project because, how can a 100,000 word first draft not become serious once you're into the story and you want to tell it? In the beginning I started out saying, "This will be crappy and I don't care." And for a little while, I didn't care. It was the beginning of the story, I could write and write and not need to be going anywhere in particular (just a general direction). And I wanted to give myself the freedom to write crap, just so I could write.

Now I'm at the stage where I do have a stake in my writing. I have a specific place I want to go, a specific ending I want to achieve--I actually came up with ideas for a concrete ending last night--these last 35k words need to complement and highlight and make sense after all the other stuff that's happened. So it almost feels like, after I hit that halfway point, that I started working backwards in a sense. Everything in the first part of the story becomes very important because it MUST dictate what happens in the last part of the story. I'm not opposed to this, not 'fighting' it or anything, but it just makes me think that much more about what I'm writing, and how aware I need to be about where my story is going at this point (and at the same time be willing to change things in the beginning to suit what's happening now). I've built everything into it; now I need to carry it.