Yesterday afternoon I flashed back to the blizzard tribulations of someone's frontier grandmother, who turned out to be a Johns, and thus an ancestor of Sheriff Art Whiddick's wife Beth.
Today, I needed to flash back even further, and continue the story that is excerpted for my novel. This is the tale of a tribe of Plains Indians encountering the nemesis of Indigo, at a time before the town has its first settler. This is the ancient hunter who steals children, and calls up the fateful weather I have been chronicling.
The developing crisis for this tribe and for a small band of hunters who have defied their leaders to slip away and, all unknowing, challenge that ancient hunter on her own ground, should be good grist for today's writing quota...
As for the process: Until now, I have worked without a 'bible' or 'catalog' of characters and their relationships. The problem is, those stories happen out of the sequence of this novel's plot-line. I've already found some issues that will have to be corrected next month when I begin editing. In the meantime, I need to take care of the growing gaps between the forward-moving chronologic novel and these flashbacks and sideways twists.
I have digital "Post-It Notes" pegged to the middle of Chapter 9, the end of Chapter 11, and so on, to tell me I have to return, and what I originally intended to fill those gaps in the word-stream. Cryptic and curt, the notes are all I have to remind me what I meant to be writing when the genie took me elsewhere instead.
Hey—at least I have something to do if writer's block should strike, no?
Total: 35,669 words.
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