I should be cooking writing.

Last night I was talking to someone about Holly and he commented that he didn’t think he’d ever met her. Because it’s often easier to hand over a profile sheet on a character than it is to explain the character, I started digging for Holly’s profile. After about an hour of hunting through the computer, various disks (those are some ancient records), my filing cabinet, and several different notebooks, I realized that there is no working profile on her. I used to have one, but it’s been eaten by some computer critter or another over the years. Or maybe she’s been in hiding and covered her tracks really well. (Sometimes the characters hide from me.) However, since she’s pushing her way to the foreground again, I need a profile and there’s not one. I’m going to have to recreate her from memory.

This got me thinking that I don’t have any profiles on any of my characters. Not really. What’s in my head is pretty much it. This is a bad thing. A very, very bad thing. I need to find (or create) some sort of formulaic profile sheet and start filling in the blanks on all the characters I have in my head. (This will also give me something to work off of when I sit down with each of them for interviews and evaluations over tea and Twizzlers.) Ideally, this would be done on the computer then backed up (twice) and printed. Sadly, this is not an ideal world and I haven’t got the first clue how it’ll actually turn out.

Good thing I’m creative. Or so they tell me.

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Ophelia’s book is kicking my ass. The reason the progress bar has been reset to zero is that I’ve stripped the prologue and redressed it multiple times in the past few weeks, and now I’m thinking it shouldn’t be a prologue at all, but rather the beginning of the first chapter which means that I need to rethink the entire timeline of the story and rewrite the beginning yet again and Ophelia keeps insisting that the whole story line is “just wrong” and demanding that I “fix it”. (*BREATHE*) It doesn’t help that I’m no longer sure WHO is in the book, either. Again we have a rather pressing need for working profile sheets and bio-jackets on everyone.

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I still don’t have a plot for NaNo. Or characters. Or anything else.

Ophelia has let me know in no uncertain terms that she will not have any part of NaNo. She’s an unruly character that way, and I don’t think she can be bribed.

Maybe that’s why Holly is reemerging. Maybe HER story will be my NaNo project.

I’ll have to think about this.