Oh No! NaNo!

After deciding to start NaNoWriMo over my vacation and having worked through the first few pages in more or less rapid succession, I was in a great mood to continue after going back to work. Then, I realized that I seriously disliked my story. Yes, my main character is a lump of borrowed surface that has inflated to its proper height, not quite 7k words.

The grand frustration is listening to my SO talk about his wonderful story, with actual plot and character. It's amazing. Despite being good for a few entertaining fights, it doesn't really help me to advance through the muck toward a livable story. The problem is the artificiality of the story. The main character, a prince of an Arctic kingdom of shape-shifting Walruses, is bored with the story. He'd rather be at home, exercising himself against his awful cousin, GrundWal, who believes himself to be the star of any number of wonderful fables. GrundWal is focused, and this focus helps him run more smoothly in the grooves that generations of Walrus royalty has etched in the icy redoubt that is their Beachhead.

ErwineWal, on the other hand, is an empty pair of eyeballs through which we view the story. He might as well be a wall with a peephole cut in it, for all the effect he has in the story. Crushing boredom.

It's even worse on rainy evenings, when the retreiver is as close to me as he can be because of the thunder outside, but not quite close enough to stretch out beside. Authorial privilege doesn't quite extend to stuffing the dog in the story and letting Erwine take the nap I'm really starting to want.

Belles loiterers,

Chrissa