NaNoWriMo day one... ish...
Word count: um...
I wrote last night! I really did. Tossed together a little narration about Lisa's southward journey after her husband's death and then started in on a scene in Ondo where Lisa figures out that she has skills that a) few people around have and b) they'll not object to an elf woman doing--reading and writing. But then I realized that it made exactly no sense.
The idea was that she'd spend a lot of time at the local inn, since she was renting a shack out back. One day, the innkeeper would be consistently getting drink orders wrong because a new deliveryman put the barrels and bottles in a different order than the established one, and the innkeeper couldn't read the labels and marks, having relied on visual cues and then, eventually, simply the positions of the containers. For some reason, I was writing him as deeply and stereotypically Scottish, with lots of "cannae"s and "lass"s. I was just to the point of the big reveal when it occurred to me that Lisa had been among human commoners, even married to one, for 15-20 years by this point and should already know perfectly well that most humans aren't literate. So, scratch 500+ words. Instead, she'll have to just set up shop.
How in the hell am I going to explain her spontaneously knowing spells?
I wrote last night! I really did. Tossed together a little narration about Lisa's southward journey after her husband's death and then started in on a scene in Ondo where Lisa figures out that she has skills that a) few people around have and b) they'll not object to an elf woman doing--reading and writing. But then I realized that it made exactly no sense.
The idea was that she'd spend a lot of time at the local inn, since she was renting a shack out back. One day, the innkeeper would be consistently getting drink orders wrong because a new deliveryman put the barrels and bottles in a different order than the established one, and the innkeeper couldn't read the labels and marks, having relied on visual cues and then, eventually, simply the positions of the containers. For some reason, I was writing him as deeply and stereotypically Scottish, with lots of "cannae"s and "lass"s. I was just to the point of the big reveal when it occurred to me that Lisa had been among human commoners, even married to one, for 15-20 years by this point and should already know perfectly well that most humans aren't literate. So, scratch 500+ words. Instead, she'll have to just set up shop.
How in the hell am I going to explain her spontaneously knowing spells?