As writing excuses go...

Okay, I admit it.  I've been slacking off on the novel this week.  I finished Nano's 50 thousand words and then I let it sit. 

Instead I've been sprucing up my blog.  I added widgets for tracking my works in progress, I created a few pages, and today I added a Goodreads gadget and I created a new logo picture. *points up*  See?  I stood in front of the mirror with the camera, white door behind me and took several pictures.  (In related news, make sure you've turned the flash off before you do this at home... unless you are going for the whole white-out, solar-flare thing as a fun special effect)  Then I loaded them into my computer and chose the one I wanted.  Then I opened it in Picasa3, a free image editing software made by Google, and cropped it and filtered it into a sepia tone.  Then I added my text with the text editor and played with the font, color and sizing till I had what I liked.  Then I saved it as a jpeg file and uploaded it.  Viola!

So... now that I've had fun decorating my playground, I'll get back to work on the novel.  Which was really what I was going to talk to you about today. 

When Nano ended I'd come to the natural breaking point in the story where it changes location and another character gets introduced.  My problem is that while I'd sketched her out, I'd not fleshed her in very well.  Now that I need her to be onstage, so to speak, I realized I hadn't done a good job of making her real to me yet.  The thing is, she's very real to my characters.  She's the one responsible, through her decisions from the back story, that changed the lives of all my main characters.

I've been using this down time to figure out how I want to present her.  Is she hard and bitter, full of revenge or charismatic and protective - not a selfish character, but one misguided through grief?  Once I lock her in and really have her in my head, there's no going back and it will set the tone of the last half of the novel.  I want her to be a vibrant character, but I admit that I'm worried that I've given her too much power over my other characters and she'll try to derail me too once she's alive on paper.  I know that sounds silly.  But silly or not, I've stopped to roll up my sleeves and grab oven mitts before I handle her.

Wish me luck!