I am planning a new story!  Here is how I’ve been planning:

I am certain that these two characters will at one point encounter a dragon.  And I am certain that Princess Natalia Neinugrava will be wearing frilly boots with suspiciously practical soles.  J_ will wear their favorite tee-shirt, even though it could never be described as lucky.  I am less certain how they will get to the next scene, because my plans for stories are a collection of scribbled scene ideas and drawings and scraps of dialogue that I am looking forward to writing.

I am sure that there are very practical ways of composing an outline, but I have a very hard time focusing on the practical when I am sitting down to write.  I have to make a game of it.  I write through the scaffolding parts of a story and am rewarded with the pieces I am most excited to write.  Dialogue and image are fun for me.  They make good rewards.

But without the context of the story they live in, they’re flat.

The trick is staying excited about the ending.  But its hard to think of the fun that far in the future.  So I draw my characters and I think about what they wear, what they think is funny, and how they’d like things to end.  And If I’ve done it write, they’ll carry that fun through after I’ve gone through the trouble of beginning.

And middling.

And to be honest, ending is hard, too.

Writing is hard.  Staying focused on a story is hard.  Sustaining the joy required for creating is very hard.  But I have managed before.  I’ll do it again.

I have another week before drafting begins.  In between, I am attending NorWesCon, which is a local-to-me convention for science fiction and fantasy.  Aside from books and the hours I’ve spent writing, it is where I get a lot of my craft education.  MFA’s are expensive, and difficult to break into when you’ve got a spotty history of education and a healthy interest in speculative fiction.  Summer spec-fic workshops are difficult to get into because of the number of applicants.  Many of the writing panels at NorWesCon are tailored to newer writers (people who have yet to sell any stories), but there are a few that focus directly on what I want to write.

Some of my favorite educational moments from last year came from watching other writers read, and I am excited to have that opportunity again.  The best education in story telling is still enthusiastic story reading.