CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

July 8 Ponderings_557 wc

I am having the worst time writing my Environmental Disaster Fantasy novel, Finding the Abandoned Child, these past few days, and I have not yet analyzed accurately why this should be the case  now. When I began the novel on June 6, it was inspired by a series of dreams the previous night, about environmental disaster and the mystery of the title. Well, I knew of course that the environmental apocalypse portion stemmed from my fears, anxieties, rage, and outright terror concerning the current and on-going destruction of the Gulf of Mexico and its land environs (and now it's looking like the Atlantic Coast is in for it too; and you can be assured that if New Orleans is experiencing oily precipitation, so will Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia-where I live-and the Carolinas, and on up the Atlantic Coastline. Maybe the Federal government should start worrying about the damage loss of tourism will do to the national economy, if the oil and tarballs work their way around between the Keys and Cuba and start up the Atlantic?).





Well, environmental destruction is occurring with or without my writing this novel, but the question I have for myself is why now suddenly, here I am one week into JulNoWriMo, with a pledged goal of writing 50, 000 words in 30 days, hoping to finish both this novel and the one I worked on March 23-31 (Child-Puppets of The Testament Logging Corporation, a historical horror which is Book Three of a series.)





In January, February, and March (March was MarNoWriMo) as is the case every November during NaNoWriMo, I have no trouble churning out the output. In fact in February and March I routinely managed anywhere from 2500-2800+ words a day! In March:


I finished an existing novel, March 1-11


I wrote a new novel, the sequel, March 1-22


I wrote 20 chapters of a third novel, Book Three of that series, March 23-31.


I should have kept on with it, because in April I wrote a 108-page stage play for Script Frenzy, which is one of the two most difficult writing tasks I have ever done. This novel has become the second most difficult. July 1 I decided it just wasn't disastrous enough (originally there had been no fatalities) so I rewrote and added on. Now I've got a scholar who was tortured under interrogation in a war twenty-two years earlier when he was a young military chaplain; many dead fisher-folk; and I'm about to put my fifteen-year-old feisty heroine into an interment camp, along with some members of her family. And I don't like it and that's what's wrong. It's pulling teeth to get the required minimum number of daily word count now (1,667).





So I think one of two events is going to occur by tomorrow:


either I stop on this one entirely for now and put it on ice (or water, more in keeping with the disaster), and work on the other novel to finish it. Or I give up the disaster-disaster-disaster negativity and instead start focusing on the mystery of the title:


the abandoned infant, naked, silent, unsmiling, unblinking, my heroine discovers immediately after she has decided she cannot possibly catch up to her mother, who specifically instructed her to remain at the Shelter rather than to accompany her (Mother) back home to their compound.