It must have been the holiday week. This story just felt hard to get to. I hit Monday, usually when I have an idea ready to go and write the first scene.

This time…nothing.

Admittedly, I’m feeling the wear of producing so many stories now. That may have played into it, so I took Monday off.

Tuesday, this was my idea:

Sword and sorcery, monsters, blow things up.

Then all I had to do was decide on a setting and a type of monster. The story is called King’s Port Clash.

The reason for sword and sorcery is that there’s an anthology call coming up. I haven’t done sword and sorcery before. I also need to practice blending emotion, setting, and action.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. It seems like a lot of writers just think that an action scene is simply a movie reel playing. Document the action in detail and it’ll be exciting.

But the excitement comes from the development of the characters and setting before the action. The reader can’t care what happens to the characters if the legwork hasn’t been done first.

And the same time, the situation has to be something the reader can relate to.

I just read a book where the writer didn’t do either one of those. She normally does really good books (enough that I bought at least 12 in the series), but this was a branch off that didn’t work. The characters were not a situation that the readers could relate to, and we jumped into an action scene without any intro to the characters. It was such a problem that I couldn’t remember the names of the characters. So instead of enjoying the action, I was distracted because the character the legwork hadn’t been done.

What went right on this:

I started to panic yesterday because I was stuck on the second to last scene. I had to keep telling myself that it was only this scene and the validation to finish. I finally resaved the file, removed the scene entirely, and started over. This time I kept telling myself “Write the next sentence,” and out popped a different direction.