A return to Bad Fairy

I jumped back into writing last night after a long hiatus. The reasons behind the hiatus are kind of a long story. But now, going back into it, I wonder if there's some subconscious reason why I didn't want to dive back into this thing too.

I left the character at a pivotal moment in the story. It's Chapter 10. A little background: This is a sequel. Book 1 details Delia's childhood. She's a very ambitious student in her fairy school, and her success story turns to misery when some people in charge decide her intentions are too radical. Some of the fairy authorities' doubts about her are rooted in distrust of her half-human heritage. She's picking up the pieces from that going into Book 2.

Delia begins the second book determined to prove her worth. She's spent six years of her life becoming the best and the brightest in her fairy school, and that was supposed to earn her the right to audition to work for royalty, but she's essentially been blackballed because of some messy stuff from Book 1, and she's trying to fight it by appealing to the king himself. Delia spends the beginning of the book exploring, plotting, wallowing, and learning, and she dabbles in understanding the human half of her heritage and experimenting with romance. But then she actually GETS the chance she's been waiting for--the chance to prove herself--and bombs it spectacularly. Now she's got to figure out what to do next. Now that all her shiny options are gone.

And it's really depressing to write, if you can believe that.

So now I've got to move in the direction of the real plot here. Everything else was setup and justification for what she does later. The plot demands that I push forward into the part where Delia becomes the bad fairy from the well-known fairy tale, and one of the complications is that I've actually already written the whole story before. I'm sort of adapting it from the old version.

Turns out the old version jumped forward two years and glossed over the part I'm writing now. I don't want to do that. But I think the reason I did that is that I have no idea about the actual details involved in establishing a new home in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world, and just wanted to fast-forward to the part where it was done and she was living there. I have no desire to spend an entire chapter reciting details about it, of course, because nobody cares about the actual building of a home and caring for a garden/a couple farm animals, but I do want the story to reflect accurate details and give enough sense of setting that it doesn't feel like it's happening in a void.

Most of the words I've added to the document as of last night weren't really new. They were adaptations of the old, made a little less flowery (or adapted to the correct level of floweriness; Delia's pretty dramatic). But when I pick it up again (hopefully tonight and for the rest of the week), I'll be writing her fifteenth birthday party--the first scene that happens within her new home. I don't have specific plans for what will happen there. I just know her friends and her mom will be there and she'll get to show them around and kind of show off. I think I'll also get to touch on her loved ones' confusion over her direction in life and her own trepidation about what her adult life will be devoted to.

I'm not concerned about not knowing what will happen, though. My characters always figure that out once I put them on the page. :)

Hopefully I'll have a Bad Fairy update for you next week detailing how many words I got down and how far I've gotten in the story. Whee!