Time flies. It’s cliché, but true. We’re already two weeks into NaNoWriMo and I should be roughly halfway through my novel. I’m not. But I’m not fretting (yet). I am, however, (much more than) halfway done with my NaNo board.

I’ve finally found the face of my female MC, Tessa Harding, and that face belongs to Christina Milian. She has the perfect balance of sweet cuteness, and sultry sexiness. 

I also managed to find the faces of two supporting characters, Sydney Averdale and Christian Cooper, portrayed by Meagan Good and Ian Somerhalder.

At one point, when I was adding the additional character photos to the board, I became choked up. It’s the moment I realized that I love my characters, even the flawed (and some might say, downright evil) ones. Granted, I love those characters in a different way; I’m trying to figure out how they became such broken people.

I’ve finally added my mind map, which should help with the journey—no more needing to dig through my notebook to find sequence of events and such.

Just looking at the board gets me fired up, but I still see whitespace and that must be rectified.

And I’m not entirely sure this is NaNoWriMo related, but I’ve been inspired to write more short stories lately. Frankly, I think it’s a stalling tactic my mind conjured up to aid its procrastination efforts, but some of the ideas I’ve had are exciting. But I’m just jotting down the bare minimum of notes so I can write them later and focus on NaNoWriMo now.

Before, I would run off the entire novel (at least, what I had), then read it through and just mark it as I went. Now, I’m only printing off one chapter at a time, beginning from the first. The goal is to tighten up the scenes, edit the language and errors, and overall, polish it, then move on to the next.

As I’m finishing up with Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell (which is a marvelous book, by the way), I’ve made some wonderful notes about scene construction that I plan to put into use, the main one being the HIP method.

1. Hook readers early
2. Intensify the scene
3. Prompt the reader to push forward

I’m proud to say that it’s the layout I’ve been following for the majority of my chapters so far, but the golden revelation for me was the section on prompts. Unfortunately, while I was aiming to push the reader forward, I found myself making one grievous mistake: ending the scene on a boring note such as having someone drive or walk away. Erm, not good.

So, a good portion of the week will be spent making my chapters end on a note that says to the reader, you must find out what happens next.

On another note, editing each chapter is posing a slight challenge because each chapter is written from the viewpoint of one of two main characters. That means I need to climb into a different character’s head and shake the previous one as I move from chapter to chapter. *sigh*