April 14th – 327,715

As I said, yesterday I’d left my heroine in a nice secure and comfortable place between scenes, so that meant today I was free to take the nascent idea I’ve had rumbling around in my head for a couple of days and run with it – decide if it had legs.

Not only that, I had a severe coughing fit early this morning, meaning I was wide awake at a very early hour, so up at an obscenely early one, leaving Marion to go back to sleep, giving me a good hour and a half of uninterrupted writing time, once the coffee had been made.

That hour and a half showed me this idea has got more than just legs, it’s a sprinter of a story – I took a deep breath and sat back, realising instead of just writing an opener and a story treatment, I’d written the first two full scenes, hitting a word count of 4,387 words.

Now I need to make a decision, do I pick it up again and write it once I’ve finished the main work in progress, which I want to get back to tomorrow, treating it as a complete ‘pantser’ exercise. Or, do I sit down and outline it properly, produce a plan for it, and make sure I’m happy where the story is going to go. The whole thing is there in my head, already, and this one isn’t a complex story, but there are potentially a lot of characters, and it could go several ways.

Ah, creative decisions, the best part of the frustrations of this job.