I just lost 15 minutes worth of writing on this blog. If anyone knows why Firefox crashes on Vista64, this becomes quite annoying.

I’ll complete this tomorrow, If I remember what I wrote about.

While I was in a waiting room this afternoon, I took out my notebook (You can laugh here; the writer has a notebook handy – that’s so cliché!) and jotted down some ideas about the next book. Some of these I have in my head since last sunday, but I elaborated on them and I think I’ve got the basic elements of the magic system. In the current book, the magic system doesn’t play a big role (in fact, at more than half book, I haven’t shown it at work yet), but in the next, I hope to put the magic system at the center.

And yes, I’ll try not to be over influenced by Warbreaker. I know, that’s hard not to think about it, especially after this week’s writing excuses.

Note 1 : I’m 500 words away from the 60k mark and I’ve done about 25k since January 1st.

Note 2 : I’ve learned that since I was a kid playing Leisure Suit Larry on an old 8086 PC “Save often, save early.” I should have saved that post before Firefox blew in my face. My fault that.

Edit : Ok, I’ll try to put here what I’ve lost last night during the crash.

I was basically saying that I have developped a dangerous pattern while writing. Essentially, as I don’t know what a given chapter will talk about, I’ll start it using non-action moments : either a peek of what’s inside the viewpoint character’s head or some story presenting setting (the current chapter has a nice passage about history). As they say, the writer writes himself into the chapter. It turns out that I need that thousand words or so in order to get a feeling of what the chapter will be. In a second part of the chapter, I can move into action and that gives a much different feel that the first part of the same chapter.

Maybe the trouble I had with chapter 19 (the previous one) was that I had to put action (it was dramatic psychology, not actual action) right at the first of the chapter and I didn’t have time to write myself into it.

That’s a big point I’ll have to consider during the rewrite : I have to write chapters that are more consistent. Maybe I will have to dump all the chapters first parts in order to have something viable. Horrible thought, that.