A Quiet Moment

Ah.

The Little 'Un is in bed, she finally gave up trying to make me carry her around all day. The Bigger One has been banished to his room for quiet time after a tantrum that lasted, I swear, most of the morning. 'Nuff.

So, a few blessed minutes to write. What I'm working on right now is faith - just writing, and never mind where it will go or what the purpose of the scene is. Just listening, and getting it down. It's been a long haul and I finally surrendered - I let my ambitions, my plans and my outline fall away. I'm offering it up now, to the characters. "Ok, then. You show me how it happened." We'll see.

The other discovery I've made lately is that I'm wordy, and my word choices and style are often a bit pretentious. Which might be fine for another kind of work, but this is a historical novel set in Scotland in the 1560s. People (at least the ones I'm writing about) didn't speak or think like this:

"To an observer, had there been any, it would be obvious that he was not out for a stroll; he walked quickly and with apparent purpose, though his destination was undecided."

That's how I normally write, I think because it amuses me. It's just me. But I'm afraid it doesn't work for the kind of story this is. It ain't Dickens, lady. This is more appropriate:

"He wasn't headed anywhere in particular, he just needed to think."

So, I have 55000 words of this to go through. I don't know whether to cry because it's all wrong, or feel elated because I can see that. I'll go with elated, for now.