Doctor Who S3 Blather

( Turn back now if you haven't seen the latest trailer/articles or don't want to be spoiled )

I think this year I am just going to watch the episodes this season and enjoy them as they come out, while totally ignoring

a) anything RTD says about the future of the show, his own brilliance, and the exact nature of the Doctor-Martha relationship;

b) all the inevitable fan-blather about whether this week's ep was better than last week's (or last season's) and whether some line the Doctor tossed off over his shoulder in a crisis means that Martha is Better Than Rose or that Gallifrey still exists in a pocket universe or that his brown suit got shrunk at the cleaner's, or some combination of all three;

and I will be much happier and more productive in the end, I am sure.

And now back to Day #1 of the Great Fast Draft Experiment, in which I have so far only managed to write 1,000 words in an hour instead of the 2,000 I was hoping for, and now have to catch up like whoa if I'm to make my quota.

Progress Report: Fast Draft, Day One

The bad news: I did not write 20 pages on my first day of Fast Draft.
The good news: I wrote 10 pages (2,727 words).

I'm going to try again tomorrow, and Saturday, and see if I can get over the stumbling blocks my Internal Editor keeps setting up for me. If I can make a spreadsheet of scenes that need to be written, that should keep me from floundering around wondering what to write next.

Other things to be done ASAP include making a chart of Thea's colored alphabet and number associations so I can refer to it at a glance, and doing a character map of Thea and Faraday.

The character map link is part of a site for screenwriters, but the concept works for novels and short stories just as well, and now that I've found it I'm quite excited about working through the questions. If you've ever struggled with finding your characters' motivations and making them three-dimensional, or with figuring out how to come up with a plot worthy of these great characters you've invented, I highly recommend Laurie Hutzler's Emotional Toolbox.

Another cool concept I've started to make work for me: making point-form notes detailing the events of the story from the perspective of each character -- including the bits of that character's backstory that most define their personality and influence their actions. For secondary characters, who appear only intermittently or for just one section of the book, this is a pretty quick exercise but I can already see how helpful it will be later on -- I never have to stop and try to figure out where they are at any given time, or worry whether their individual stories make sense when they're not "on-screen", so to speak. It helps to remind me that these characters aren't props -- they're people, with lives of their own even if those lives aren't the story I'm telling.

Off to bed now. Yawn.