Project Transformation Part Six - Premature Celebration

It is a fact universally acknowledged that being aware of how good things are going is usually the first step towards them going wrong.

Complacency sets in. Motivation slips a little. Self-belief gets a wee bit out of hand.

I don't think that's what has happened here but dear me, the timing is something eh?

Part of it was the three day weekend. I take weekends off mostly, do some worldbuilding if I'm feeling crazy. I find it difficult to focus on writing on days that are utterly formless and due to how much I'm doing on the weekdays and the state of the world, need to slough off a little brain detritus.

Part of it was a panic I got into last night about whether I was pursuing this story idea the right way. There I was, puzzling away at the relationship between Sooley and his new soul, and it occurred to me "Why aren't they separate?". Well. Why not? It makes a lot more sense. It just also completely invalidates thirty thousand words. What did I do? Forge on and hope for the best? Wait for a solution? Forge on with what anyway?

I decided to solve this as best I could. I'm sure most of us have heard of the idea of writing what your dream fan letter would look like. I started doing that with my head and didn't get very far as I hit the answer almost immediately. I want this story to be really eloquent on what it's like to suddenly become powerful, to be a hero, a stakeholder, someone who can really make things better - or worse. That doesn't work if it's just this old prehistoric knight brought back to life. Great story, but they're not going through that.

Of course, now I've written it out, there's no reason it can't be both - MC gets power from a quieter soul, prehistoric knight running around. I'm so great at thinking things through.

But! That still fits with what I've written, more or less. So I can keep going.

I'm currently on a big action scene. It's dragging, not least because I don't really know what my limitations are. It's tempting to just write *PLACEHOLDER* and come back once the theme has made that clearer, but right now I'm going to keep plugging as Plan A. That plugging has definitely helped make a lot of the character dynamics start to pulse, and start giving Sooley his personal stakes, which seem to be an old friendship from a dark place, and a touch of lust elsewhere. I know I keep saying it, but the whole point of this process is to force answers out. They might be bad answers, but even bad answers can be the bad version of a good idea.

And with that said, the good version of a good idea is to get some sleep.