NaNo Day 13 - The forgotten character

My muses sun and blue sky are dancing out the living room windows. For the last couple mornings, I've developed a little writing routine: make a cup of coffee and pull out my purple notebook. I jot down some inspirations for the current scene I'm working on and squiggle lines between different possibilities.

After my second coffee, I almost dropped my pen. I'm starting Chapter 7 and totally forgot to introduce my third main character. Okay fine I did some name-dropping, but according to my plotline he's supposed to be in the next scene and he's still 3 days away in an other village. Crap.

I got carried away with the relationship between Shiri and Jason, just seeing how they interact together. But uh yeah, they can't really go exploring without the other guy. So now I'm faced with a dilemma: continue to pants my way toward a different outcome for the same scene, or edit my chapters AGAIN to insert the other guy.

If you were me and you've become part of the nano machine there's only one answer: just keep going. "But, but, but...my plot perfection will be ruined!" my mind repeats to me."What about all the other YA novels you've been researching? All main characters are introduced in chapter one!"

Hmm. I need some cereal and coffee to continue this battle. I'll let you know who wins.....

~ * ~

Oh hoh! A comprise has been reached. My sister-in-law came over as I was in the middle of making a pros and cons list about editing previous chapters. Her great advice was to create a separate document where I could edit older chapters for my new character and save it for later. Then in my current writing, just "pretend" he was there the whole time so I can continue with the main story. Genius! Thanks bestie!

But in the end, I only spit out 370 extra words today, on hand-written sheets of paper. It was so jammed pack with events that I just didn't have the mental power to type it out. It's almost evening again and my NaNo has made little progress. Urk.

That's why I don't even have an excerpt for today...sniff...

I'm gonna need a lot of writing support tomorrow.