No writing today. Busy with jobhunting stuff. I hope to get back to work tomorrow. I can't remember exactly what I was working on last, but I think I was trying to organize a section so that it made sense, as well as keeping a decent pace and building to something rather than fading off into self-indulgent blah-blah-blah that I like to read and write but that has nothing to do with the actual story at hand.

The problem is that I have allll this info. Somehow I've got to get it into an order that holds the reader--or at least, some readers...hell, if it could hold any readers, that would do right now--but also gives the reader everything they need to know for later.

What does the reader need to know? Well, characters have to be introduced, but naturally rather than clumsily shoehorned in. And the mindset of the world is very important. It's not the same as ours, so I have to make sure the reader "gets" it and doesn't apply modern moral judgment or wonder why the characters don't use modern solutions to solve their problems.

If I didn't have those two things, it might be a heck of a lot easier to write this. Just two little things...hmm. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to get them in. You'd think.

Maybe one thing to do is to think about what the story would look like if I didn't have those two things hanging over my head. Maybe if I try to think what shape the story would have without them, it could help guide me to the shape it needs to be with them. Then I'll have some parameters to work with, which could help in knowing what to mercilessly cut.

This all sounds good, but I'm sure I'll have forgotten about it tomorrow. Oh well. I will put a sticky note on my computer telling myself to come back and reread this entry if I can't think what I want to work on.

That's a slippery slope, though--rereading entries. I could avoid writing for days, probably, if I started rereading entries. I surely ought not to do that, if possible. So, no sticky note. Maybe I'll actually remember it, now that I've been talking to myself about it for a few paragraphs.