The Sabbatical--my new WIP

I've been thinking about this (new) novel for over a year. I had the setting, the characters, the opening, the ending, and a vague idea of the middle. I remember the dinner I had with my friend C. in Iqaluit at the Frob, just over a year ago. I told her about the plot, and we brainstormed a little. She's a writer too, so she understands. I remember being stuck on my protagonist's intentions--why would she do this? I wasn't sure. Then for the entire year I thought about writing it, but something held me back. Meanwhile I revised Swearing in Russian for yet another time, moved to Halifax, bought a new house and moved there, and didn't feel like writing. I convinced myself that thinking about writing was actually good enough. And actually, it was! I came back to the novel (tentative title is The Sabbatical) and the outline came out of me. This is pretty new, as I usually struggle with outlines and do better without them. But after working with Victoria, I started to internalize some of her principles of tension building and pacing. And this is how the outline just happened, with this basic idea that one conflict leads to another and yet to another. I don't have a very thorough outline, I don't think I will enjoy that, but I have a functional outline that helps me to navigate to the ending, with some basic ideas of how relationships between my characters develop.


This morning I woke up 2 hours before the first kid woke up (3 hours before the second, 4 hours before my night owl who will go to bed after midnight)...This is all courtesy of the City of Halifax, who needed to dig up our water pipe this morning, so that the plumber could replace the shut off valve, so that he could hook up my washing machine. Did I tell you we just moved into an OLD house? Yeah, most things don't work. Yet, I love being here.

I wrote about 900 words. What a pleasure to be finally writing it! I feel like I'm weaving with words. It is the joy and the energy of a first draft--rough weaving, no worries, just the process. But I can see the characters are already much more defined that in my previous opening chapters. (I had written about 15000 words of it already, but I'm writing from scratch now, and might use the previous work in later revisions, or I might not. The focus is somewhat different--there's much less of the supernatural in this version. I simply don't want to have a ghost in every novel!)

Lessons learned: thinking about a novel, even for more than a year, is a good thing; outlining can be learned (but I think it comes easier to some than to others); writing is a true pleasure; quiet mornings are an inspiration.