Dusted

Trying to do that 1,000 words a day. I'd still like to be that productive but hitting a daily average is maybe not the best measure. Even if Scrivener does have some cute session and document target tracking tools.

I think of the time I spent building sets for theatre. Doing drafting and cutting pieces of wood for days. Assembling raw flats and platforms (because you need a lot of those) for weeks. Base them and turn them over to Scenic for painting. Then the day you start trucking the stuff over to the theater and start assembling it on stage, people are coming around with "You guys did a lot of work today."

So, yeah. I threw down a 1,400 word scene that included a lyrical description of a train ride through the Italian Alps (based largely on a single video I saw.) And then had to stop for two days; first to figure out if I was even on the right route. Then to find out what the weather was actually like in Brennen Pass at the time of year I'd set the scene in. The revision gained me another 200 so it wasn't all loss.

Discovery writing is always a bit give and take. I was planning on going directly to Padua, but I felt like putting another obstacle in. Verona was on the way. What do they have? Well, there's "Casa di Giulietta." The scene wrote itself. Verona also seemed to offer some opportunities; there's the Jewish Quarter of the central (old) city. A German synagogue that's been turned into a museum and some Jewish cemeteries. So I made a rough draft of the scene. But turns out both of the latter are off route for the natural path from railway station to my chosen osteria. So review and re-draft.

Plus I was sick today. Wrote anyhow...but when I hit the target, I stopped. So there's that, too.

I'm constrained in the Italy sequence in that it is really time to get back to Greece and the real focus of the story. Also, I've made the point of those first clumsy days of learning how to travel and there's no more need to do blow-by-blow. But that's turning out to be weird to accomplish.

See, I've been doing first-person immediate. That means that the only text that can appear on the page is what the character is actually thinking more-or-less contemporary with the action being presented. That's why the narration can't say, out of the blue, "I got maths degree at Oxford." Instead there has to be a trigger, say a couple of students singing the ribald University of Padua graduation song, so the narration can describe that and go on, "...we didn't have anything like that at Oxford."

I have several places where I want to go back and shift more things to dialog, where it is more natural anyhow.

In the same sense of discovery writing, I needed to show her texting a friend back home in one scene in order to get a clue to a third party. One thing led to another and that off-stage character has basically become a confidante. Someone my protagonist can dialog things to instead of narrating them in her head.

Another constraint is that I've already done the whole "learning to communicate" routine with German. I don't need and don't want to do Italian as well. So I'm forced to skip over, paper over, and otherwise leave a lot of stuff off stage. Just like I'm doing for finding directions, learning when and where to eat, and all that other good stuff. The theme for this sequence is, "Being a somewhat experienced traveler."

Not to say she shouldn't still make mistakes. In fact, I've decided she needs to make more. So another thing to go back and edit in. Have more of her stunts fail, and take things further; have her get actively embarrassed, have that sort of tongue-tied language meltdown you get when you are riding on half-remembered lessons and instinct and it fails you. Etc.

Oddly enough this is a lot less work than it sounds. The hard part was blocking the scenes and the general flow of dialog. I can give it a different spin in a lot less time.

So I spent the last half of my sick day watching videos from Dust. And more travel videos. I've done all I need to for Verona and the Padova sequence is almost entirely a conversation between two people having a meal at the Osteria l'Anfora.

I should add I can do that sort of thing (using videos and TripAdvisor entries and Google Maps and Frommer's) because I've actually been to Europe; to Athens and Paris and Berlin and Salzburg and more than a few smaller towns as well. So I can see what's not always there, like trash and tourists and weather, and fill in some of the sensory details like walking on cobblestones, and otherwise sanity check what I'm being shown.