If I’m going to make it, I’m going to have to get serious. If I write my quota every day and catch up with a couple of 7500 word days, I might just manage. I had writer’s block for the last few days until I went back and wrote up the back stories for Lisao and Gerth ((Formerly Gerd, which I realized was also the acronym of an unfortunate medical condition. Oops.)), both of which involve death and rebirth of a sort, not necessarily in that order.

Each morning, Rengu refused to till the field where Lisao had collapsed and died.

In the first days after her death on the day that summer turned into autumn, he had harvested it only because he needed the money it brought in town to make up for her funeral expenses, small as they were. The act seemed one of sacrilege, to touch the yams she had paid the utmost attention and care to, the very last things she had blessed with her presence, in the field where her blood had spilled from her mouth as her heart burst in her chest.

…

Rengu began to approach the rock in awe before remembering that the blue fire could only be foxfire, a trick used by the fox spirits to lure in the unsuspecting before killing them with a mere touch. For the first time in months, he stood at the edge of the field and stared at the place where Lisao had died, and he wondered if he dared to touch the rock and die where she last lived, that they would be together in the next life.

He felt like a coward when he turned away from burning rock in fear for his miserable existence in the world of the living.

…

#

After the fires of Ragnarok cleansed the three worlds, burning down the tree of Yggdrasil that connected them all, Middle Earth was reborn anew. The ground rolled with lush green grasses where once there had only been the scorched earth where the last fire giant had been slain, and before that the deep snows of endless Fimbulwinter. Flowers bloomed across the green meadows, and trees—all the offspring of Yggdrasil—sprouted and grew in days, sparse woods that soon became forests spreading across the rims of glens and the inland sea.

In the vibrant new world, Baldur walked the earth after countless years spent in the court of Hel, and all living things loved him and renewed him with their love. At his touch the flower and tree and even mistletoe grew; with his breath came the gentle warmth of an endless spring to counter the endless winter that had preceded the world’s rebirth. In his hands he formed from clay once more the animals, from the running deer to the flying dove, from hungry-eyed hawks to prowling wolves (for the cycle of life had to begin anew, and no peace can last forever).

…

When he found the wondrous golden tree, he knew this would be Yggdrasil. Its very boughs glowed with celestial light, and the golden apples of forever life could be found amongst the branches. He named her Gerth after the fair Jotunn goddess who had been so loved by Freyr, and so wronged by Skirnir and been the target of the scorn of the gods and elves alike.

…

Everything hurts. I’m stopping right now because I feel dizzy from it all. @_@ Writing myths has great power once you get into the patter of it, but damn, it’s such mood whiplash from the rest of the book. And if you know anything about the many myths of Sedna, Psann’s mother, you know that everything hurting right now is nothing compared to how everything will hurt.

But the new back stories change a significant amount of the present story. I’ve noticed I must make notes about the previous chapters’ wrongnesses and then keep going or else I’ll never catch up—not a bad philosophy, because I really need to get the story’s structure down before I lose it (or worse, never get around to finishing it).

And if I have to write scenes out of order, I will write them out of order, because otherwise writer’s block is going to pound me and I’ll never catch up. Reordering them into something like a sensible timeline will be for the revision phase.

And if I have really bad scenes, I will finish them until they write themselves out and dump them into a folder called Shenanigans and keep going, since they may or may not end up as part of the final draft. I can’t really tell at this point.

Regardless, there’s no way this single story is 80k. At best it’s a 50k first book of a possible series; I think I could write about this world for quite some time and still not exhaust it, because that’s what happens when you decide to write what is, essentially, world myth fan fiction.

I should break 15k this evening and strive for 16k.