In spite of the incredible tennis tonight (Venus! Jelena! Roger! Andy!), I still managed to get a bit of wordage in.  That’s Chapter One all done.

Not a bad night’s work, considering I’ve neglected this story for so long.  I was letting it simmer on my mental backburner.  I know the main character of SanClare Scarlet so well, it’s easy to write him.  Sophie is someone I’m still getting to know, which makes the going a bit slower.  I like her, though.  I wrote a scene tonight where I think I found out a key thing about her.  Here’s the pivotal snippet:

When she’d finally climbed into bed sometime later, left alone by her maid and Polly and faced with her own thoughts, she had to dig her nails into her palms to keep the tears at bay. All she wanted was to fix things, but she’d already made so many mistakes. She wished more than anything that she had John’s courage and Polly’s gumption, but she was only Sophie. And that had never yet been good enough.

“Life!  Don’t talk to me about life!” — Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide

Real Life^TM has been busy and full of stuff and traveling and exhaustion, so no actual typing on books has been done since my last post (le sigh).  However, that doesn’t mean the work hasn’t been ongoing.  During my long, very damp drives through the state of Indiana, I worked on the backstory and plot of La Cause.  This idea is still new and shiny and not fully-formed, so any thinking time I get to spend on figuring out this new world and its people, I use.  The important part of writing is the putting-the-words-down part, but the percolating, thinking, planning, etc., time is essential, too.   It just can’t be all that gets done, or I’m basically a daydreamer and not a writer.

So this weekend, there will be much typing.  With La Cause it may all be notes and scribbles about the story and no actual wordage, but with Scarlet, there will be word-counter progress made!

Right after lunch…

I finally figured out who my main character was for this, and I’ve started over from the beginning because Sophie-Katrine Pathescarte is a far different character from either Alice or Sarah. There will still be a race, a disaster, a secretly-mailed letter, and mayhem, but that will come a bit later and a bit differently than in the original draft.

I “found” the character and the story when this blurb popped into my head during a drive a couple of weeks ago.

Sophie-Katrine Pathescarte has a secret that could end her perfect, high-society engagement, ruin her entire family…and save the kingdom.

And for this version, I’ve made a nice start tonight:

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