it wasn’t ideal, but i made a judgment call this week to put a hold on the daily blog while i turned all of my creative writing efforts toward completing the first draft of the opening three chapters of my fiction project. my deadline for delivery was saturday night, and i am happy to say that i did complete the first three chapters before midnight. i didn’t, however, deliver those chapters to stock.henry before calling it a night as i had originally planned to. the reason was that the final section of the third chapter was weak, and i needed to sleep on it. this morning, i woke up and flowed right through that section, bringing it to heel so that it ended up just where i wanted it to be.

some things that i am realizing now are that 1) dialogue is my strength, and i use that as my number one means of moving the story forward; 2) i tended to shy away from going too deep in my descriptions of people, places and things while i was working on my first draft of these chapters, so i’m going to have to comb through them carefully to find the right moments to add in those details without interrupting the flow or changing the trajectory of the story i’ve already written; and, 3) i can’t wait to continue writing this story. the good news is, i don’t really need to do any more research to keep going with the next three-chapter segment, and i have a good feeling with the direction this book is taking. there is one character that i need to integrate into the social dynamic a bit more cohesively, and i need to flesh out a convo that leads my characters to where they end up at the close of the third chapter, but the most important thing for me at this point was getting them somewhere interesting so that the main story arc can continue to move ahead without getting stuck in the details.

so now what? i think from here on out i need to try to push out one chapter per week, or some equivalent amount of work. at the moment i can work with the characters i already have and continue pushing ahead with the storyline, but soon i’ll need new people to come in and join the fray. i’ll also need to step back at some point and really lay out the capital city and other settings as they become relevant. so yeah, a chapter per week, barring any other scaffolding work.

ok this isn’t my fiction blog, so i should probably leave myself something to talk about over there. yesterday i did a photo shoot for a fashion brand that a friend of mine is part of, and all in all it went pretty well. i will say that 90% of the time was spent waiting for her to get prepped, and as a result, we really missed the light that i was going for. part of the issue was that there was a thick blanket of clouds in the sky, which really cut into the already weak winter light. a thin layer of clouds can be a good thing for giving off soft diffused light, but yesterday’s cloud cover was more than i prefer.

ill have to do a full after-action review on this one, because we definitely had a mix of things gone right and wrong. but as always, i’m pretty certain we got some great photos, and that’s the most important thing.