Commentary on Day Two and Four

This weekend didn’t go as planned and so I wasn’t able to get any writing done on Sunday. The truth is that I was barely able to get any writing done on Saturday.

Foolish of me to think I’d be able to easily get to write uninterrupted with a newborn. Especially since weekends are always a difficult time for me to write since that’s when the whole family is together. For this reason, it took about 13 hours for me to get my daily quota in on Saturday.

And so rather than fight against that, I’m just going to plan accordingly. I won’t be writing on the weekends anymore, unless I’m able to get the time alone required without sacrificing family time. With that in mind, my goal is to make up the difference during the weekdays.

Of course, wordcounts are all arbitrary and I don’t anticipate this going the full 50k that nanowrimo is known for, so it may not make a difference.

Anyway, Day Two’s narrative also didn’t go entirely as planned. I thought I’d get to an adversarial place between these two much faster but I suppose I’m taking the slow way.

And I think this is the right way. To build these two together and demonstrate a closeness, giving them a reason to fall into one another through hopelessness and hurt.

And so the writing today, on this fourth day of the month, is playing into that as well. There’s an urge in me to jump to the combativeness required to make this narrative work, but rushing to it may make the entire thing fall apart.

However, this does make for a slower start instead.

And so I’ll have to trust that people are willing to read a slower start on the promise of what comes next.

But here in Day Four are where I’m planting seeds that will bear fruit somewhere down the line. For all Calypso’s hurt and sorrow, she needs Odysseus in a way that he does not need or want her. And she will seek to possess him rather than love him.

Another trial for our hero, though I don’t want this to feel like his trial. Rather, it should be hers. She’s the center of this novel and so I want to make the reader understand how love and need and hope and fear can lead us to become a monster. When all we wanted was love and affection, we begin to feel like we are owed it.

This is making me think of real world analogues but I won’t talk about them here or in the novel’s text. But I hope to build a resonant space where people can draw their own connections between what’s here to their own life and to the lives of those they know or have only heard of in the news.

Anyway, I think the next few days will be more establishing this relationship. This is a romance, after all, and it will live and die by these two people together.

Perhaps part of the impetus here is my recent interest in writing a romance novel. Not just a novel with romance but a proper romance novel that might be shelved on a Romance shelf. This is certainly not what anyone might expect from me and possibly not what anyone wants from me, but that’s the fun of these little writing challenges, yes?

To experiment and play.