#WIPpet Wednesday and #ROW80 Update:

I have to admit, I’ve been rather lax with my participation in ROW80 this round. And that keeps happening. But now that my holidays are officially over and I’m into more of a routine, I’ll be able to really make a crack at it. I hope.

On that note, while I was on holidays, I didn’t take my laptop with me, but I did take my notebook, and I wrote maybe 500 words on at least three different evenings. As my goal is work for an hour or write at least 500 words on Tuesdays and Fridays, I call that a win. I also wrote a few pages at work on Monday, and then I spent my writing group’s meet-up last night typing all of that up. It took forever, and I actually ended up leaving some notes to myself in big red letters where I decided to completely change things. The exciting thing is that at nearly 10k, the first draft of Unicorn Love is just about finished. It does need some good revising, though. I need Aphrodite to be more interfering throughout the story, and the ending is far too convenient (it’s a literal deus ex machina, actually). But! It’s a first draft. That should be done by next Wednesday with any luck.

The problem with a WIP so short, of course, is that after a few weeks it’s getting rather hard to find a WIPpet that doesn’t spoil the entire story. I have some nice bits of dialogue from the end, but they do give away everything. I was going to get you guys’ advice on the back cover copy I have written for AMCF, but I will do that next week when I’m not typing this at my writing group’s Tuesday night meeting because I’m seeing a play on Wednesday night (this week is awful; stuff on every week night). I did find this bit though. Six paragraphs, which I got from adding the month to the day.

In this scene, Lydia has gone back in time to before she became a cupid. She is poor and living as part of a little street gang who do what they can to look after for one another and scrape by. The person she is talking to is David. The real one, this time, not the fake version Aphrodite created in this scene.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he greeted her when she opened her eyes. “Today’s the big day. Are you ready?”

“No,” she replied, sitting up again and yawning. “Oh, good lord,” she said, the worrying thought suddenly occurring to her. “There’s no coffee here.”

“What?”

“Um. Nothing. Ignore me. Just tired.”

“You don’t like coffee. You tried it once, when the nuns were handing out food and drink.”

“I know I… I had a strange dream, that’s all. I liked coffee in the dream.”

Feel free to join us for WIPpet Wednesday! All you need to do is post an excerpt from your WIP that somehow relates to the date (eg. 4+2 paragraphs). Then link up with us here. Many thanks to K. L. Schwengel for hosting us.

In other news, we have all heard about Harper Lee agreeing to publish a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, right? I honestly can’t decide quite how I feel about it. I studied TKAM in school, like everyone else, and it was probably more difficult to appreciate as a non-American 16-year-old, but I did appreciate it much more later on (confession: not that I have ever actually re-read it. I just, um, watched the movie a great deal. Come on, you guys, Gregory Peck.). I’m going to copy and paste my boyfriend’s response from Facebook, because he basically sums it up:

Yes, like anyone else with literary inclinations, I relish the idea of being able to read Harper Lee’s sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. But before you start to place your pre-order, consider reading between the lines. Lee has always been known as a recluse, she was always protected by her lawyer sister in her business dealings, her sister has been dead for only three months, and Harper is by all accounts in the throes of senility, not always understanding the documents she signs. If she is genuinely (as the press releases say) “humbled and amazed that this will now be published”, that’s fantastic. With so many signs pointing to exploitation of a frail old woman, though, I’m a little more suspicious.

There is also the fact that it doesn’t sound so much like a sequel, as the book that ended up becoming TKAM in the first place. Not that I’m saying it can’t work because it was written first, but it sounds like one of those situations where you write the book you think you want to write, only to discover it was just the hiding place for an even more amazing book. Anyway, I suppose it remains to be seen.

I’m going to head off now, and I’ll see you around on your own blogs!

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