Beyzl Inspiration

Had a good weekend. Wrote almost 5,000 words today alone, and about 2,000 yesterday. I was going to stop after 2,000, but then I thought about the carrot that I've put out there for myself and decided to keep writing. Last year during NaNo, I set the reward that I'd get a Starbuck's Chai every 10,000 words, and that worked pretty good. I'd planned on doing the same thing this year, but I never seem to make it into Joplin when I'm due for one. So, I'm now at 36,000 words and I haven't had a Chai yet. Strange.

But, this year I've set myself a reward for finishing. Or more accurately it's more of a punishment for not finishing. There's an ebook series that I'm crazy about right now (the Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Host), and the last book is due to come out on November 25. I know that if I buy it on the 25th, I won't get any other writing done until I finish it, so I've made the deal with myself that I have to finish my 50,000 words before I can buy it. If that takes me longer than December 1st, so be it. But, I'm kind of hoping that I'll be able to get to it sooner rather than later.

I also thought I'd talk about the inspiration for Beyzl in this post. I first had the idea over a year ago. In fact, I thought about writing it for last year's NaNo, but something about the story made me not want to have it be my first novel. I've heard that authors get a lot better the more they write, so I wanted to be better than I was for it. I'm still not sure if I'm good enough, but I also didn't want to put it off any longer, so I'm working on it now.

The idea came to me in a dream. Isn't that a cliche? But, it's true. The dream had mostly been about the feeling of being chased. And, I can remember that I had stolen something and was being chased by the guards of the person I had stolen from. Then I hid the item that I had stolen and went to meet an older woman who reminded me of my mom. Then I recovered the item and returned to the place I had stolen it from and confronted the person there.

Looking back, I guess part of it was more of a nightmare, huh? The strongest parts were the hiding parts. But, I guess that's what makes something stay with you. When I woke up from the dream, I quickly wrote down the general outline of the story:
Girl steal something from someone powerful (I made it a queen)
Girl has to run and hide
Girl meets a 'hermit/teacher' type who trains her in the use of her abilities
Girl returns to the queen

The outline has gone through some changes since then. The biggest is that I have been having trouble finding a really good reason for why she would go back. I need a really good reason for why she has to, something with good (read terrible) consequences if she doesn't. Currently, I'm having her attempt to retrieve the daughter of the 'teacher' type from the queen's control, but I'm not sure if I'll keep that. It'll be a shame to have to rework the whole story, since that's the driver for like the whole last half, but I just don't know if it's a strong enough motivation.