In July, 1882, Vincent Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother, Theo. In it, he included a watercolour and his thoughts on the tree setting he used. I think it is such a wonderful setting that I thought I’d use it for today’s prompt:

A sombre landscape — that dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duckweed, in the distance a Rijnspoor depot where railway lines cross, smoke-blackened buildings — also green meadows, a cinder road and a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment.

Here is another random sentence for today’s prompt:

She came out to chat with Bessie and climbed onto the large window seat.

For today, another sentence recovered from my spam file:

I will never call you aunt again as long as I live.

Here’s a little scenario for today’s prompt:

I lied to him about where I would be for the next couple days. Well, maybe not so much lied as told him only as much as I wanted him to know–which wasn’t much at all. Can you stay out of my life, I thought. Or at least pretend that’s what you are doing.

In my spam this morning came this perfectly formed writing prompt. One has to wonder, where is s/he going? And is Bessie going as well? And why?

Bessie and I stepped out the front door and into the darkness–I with my small case.

I realized yesterday that I’d given up last year’s NaNo not because of the lack of plot, but because of the believability of the rock I decided to throw at my main character. So for today’s prompt, throw the biggest, most unbelievable rock at your character you can possibly find. Then make it plausible.

Ooh, I had another revelation the other day. I’m not really a plotter after all. I write by the seat of my pants, have an hilariously great time doing so, and wind up pulling my hair out afterward trying to fix everything.

I hoped to preempt that by plotting the idea for the steampunk story, but couldn’t get past some very wonderful character development. At that point, I decided to continue with the re-writes on the 2007 NaNo by deleting the entire second half of the story and working from scratch. Things are finally getting somewhere. The last missing bit of the plot fell into place yesterday (even though the word count fell short). Oooh so exciting. Now maybe I can actually finish it.

I have a hard time with the words was (or is) followed by a gerund. In case anyone isn’t familiar with the grammatical term, a gerund is any verb turned into a noun by adding ‘ing’.

Used with the verb ‘was’, gerunds completely change the action (and tense) in a sentence. Implied in the phrase ‘was walking’, for example, is the additional phrase ‘in the process of’. Your character hasn’t yet completed the action of walking so it should read x was in the process of walking down the street.

Which means anything could happen before your character takes that next step. Maybe they will skip instead. Keel over dead. Who knows.

At least if someone is hitting your character, the potential exists for them to get out of there before the arm connects with their nose (or at least before the second blow hits).

I wanted to write something yesterday for that cool sentence, but by the time I finished resisting what I needed to write for yesterday’s word count (see previous post), it was time for bed. Way past time for bed.

For today’s prompt, find a word that has multiple meanings and write a scene where characters are confused by that word (Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ skit is a great example of this). To get you started, here are a few potential words: blue, shift, stand, or cleave (that one has two opposite meanings).

I’d love to say it’s futile, but that hasn’t proved true so far. When I first started doing revisions on my WIP, I thought of moving a scene near the end of the book to the middle. I thought through all the implications and knew I had to do it. I started at the beginning with that goal in mind, deleting scenes and strengthening characters. And hit a wall.

Went back to the beginning. Started again. This time, I deleted a major character and an entire plot thread (one that seemed like the premise of the book but wasn’t). Hit the same wall.

Went back to the beginning. You see the trend, right? So I forced myself to read it start to finish and make notes on credibility (or verisimilitude if you want to call it that). Came to the same conclusion I had the first time. Started again, but only so I could plow through that middle section, sticking the end in the middle where it belonged.

And capow. Same wall. I diddled around with one scene for a month. Along came NaNo. Wrote another scene leading up to that necessary move. Diddled some more. And last night, I finally realized why I’m resisting moving that scene. It is presently part of the climax. I can’t help but wonder if I will kill the book at a mere 45,000 words by moving that scene where it belongs.

But last night, I reminded myself I have a hard copy and can always move things back if it doesn’t work the way I think. And that’s what this year’s NaNo is for. If the end becomes the middle, I have a hell of a lot more book to write.