I went through the first few weeks of Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers working on short story projects, but I’ve decided to go back to the beginning of the material and start working out my novel project. It’s something I’ve had an inkling of for a long time but never really put to paper, with characters salvaged from a NaNoWriMo project that sank, not quite as dramatically as the Titanic (but maybe not too far off).

So I’ve got my initial idea written down in the form of a few words meant to draw the images in my head back to the surface whenever I look at them. I’ve got The Sentence (something like a 30-word pitch). From these scant thirty words I can already see that my heroine is passive and needs something to drive her. I also need to figure out what sets her apart from other people, the reason the story is about her. I’m tempted to make her love interest the main character instead, but I’m going to resist for now. She just needs a little work.

This new project is codenamed Verdegris, after The Green Knight.