I love my writing group

The local writing group I'm a part of always tends to fall away during NaNo and we try to get it going again in the new year.

As a change of pace, this year we met at a cafe instead of someone's house and tried doing a write-in for the first time. I wrote this scene January 7th in downtown Victoria in an unheated cafe (where our fingers were locking up from the cold) tossing back hot tea and coffee and catching up on all we'd missed over the previous couple of months.

It was awesome.

It was also when my main character finally got a name... 'cause I literally couldn't finish writing the sentence until there was a name. It was also the moment I realized what awful thing Issabel had done to land them all in trouble in the first place, and when I first noticed there was a romantic relationship hovering threateningly in the distance...

Yup. Total pantser. The words just showed up on the page and I went, "Oh wow, really? That's what happened?" Before I wrote the scene, I didn't know what Issa did or why... and even when I finished, I knew why she did it... I just couldn't understand why what she did will get her what she wants. Which is the reason this scene ends the way it does. See, I'm not actually trying to hold back information and throw cryptic lines out there to entice the reader further... most of the time, it's just the fact that I have no idea what happens next.

I was joking with one of my CP's that it's like someone has handed me a single sock and said, "work out how the mate for this will save the world." So, here I am with a sock in my hand, I know the purpose is to save the world, I just have no idea how to connect the two things.

Ah, pantsing... always an adventure :) Somewhere deep in the folds of my brain, I know where this is going... my conscious mind just hasn't been filled in yet ;) It's on a needs-to-know basis.

Anyway, this scene means a lot to me, short as it is ;) As you can see, meeting for about 4 hours didn't do much for my word-count, but we had a lot of fun together, and I was able to bounce my thoughts of that dreaded romantic relationship against some friends who, certainly did roll their eyes, but listened and earnestly gave me their opinions.

The only change that has been made to this scene is part about Mica, the dog. Originally he had gone with them to cut the herd and wandered off after that, but after writing a few more scenes, I realized that wouldn't have been possible, so had to go back to this scene, and to 2 scenes previous to throw in a mention that he wasn't around.

Last scene was here.