Hello, everyone! It is May again, and the anniversary of this website. I checked my host provider; everything is up to date and ready to keep running for another year.

Last time, I told you I was in the middle of sorting through an enormous pile of notes. That pile is not gone yet, but it now medium-sized instead of huge. As I go farther back, more and more of the notes are personal reminders instead of story ideas. Most of these are no longer relevant, and progress is faster.

You may recall that last year’s NaNoWriMo draft did not get finished, mostly because I had too little idea of where the story went. I’ve been working on that, too. One piece of writing advice I have found is that the villain drives the plot; our protagonist, the hero, reacts to the villain. Also, no one is the villain of their own story; the villain has a reason for what they do. So, I started with my antagonist. The usurper king of that story has motives now, as well as a progressive, logical descent into near-insanity.

That is not next! The science fiction story is next. I need to skim through my notes about it to make sure there are no more large changes, clean up the editing marks, and send it to some beta readers! I hope they can help. There is still something wrong with it, and I cannot tell what.

After that, perhaps I shall attempt to complete last year’s draft during this Summer’s writing event. Perhaps not. There are infinite ways to make use of a community with simultaneous similar goals. I find that the organized writing events NaNoWriMo puts on are helpful to me; they keep me alternating between intense and relaxed work, and I get more done overall.