No writing of my own today. I worked on a writing talk I'm supposed to give in about a week. I just realized last night that I also have to give a 30-minute reading while I'm there. I hope I don't bore everybody to death. I love talking about writing, but what I have now is mostly about my process and my struggles and mistakes, and it's kind of technical on top of that. Me, me, me--just like this blog, come to think of it.

I wrote over 8K words of what I want to say. Why can't I write that much on my novel mss? I may have hit 3K in one day, on a very rare occasion, maybe even 4K once--the period when I might have done it is all a blur, so I don't know--but never on my own projects. Yesterday was an excellent day at over 2K of new stuff, but there are days and days where I rewrite one paragraph for hours till I get it right, sometimes losing word count rather than gaining. And what's weird is I'm usually pleased about it, and feel that I've made good progress.

Anyhow. I think when I get back to work on my WIP, I want to write out some backstory. I suspect that writing out backstory will help me zero in on what the current story needs to accomplish. Fingers crossed, anyway.

I'm writing in first person present tense so far, so I wonder what I'm going to do with the backstory. His voice is very modern, but his backstory takes place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not to mention he's Irish, and I'm sheer Texan through and through. Maybe he'll tell it in first past, but as if he's looking back--like he's narrating his own life. We'll just have to see how it wants to come out.