It’s five days into NaNoWriMo and I think it’s fair to say I started out with lots of vagueness. I had some characters and some disjointed ideas, but a couple of days in I was struggling.”My main character can’t do anything,” “What’s the time traveller’s motivation?” “These events don’t develop the character,” “There aren’t enough pixies!”. These are the problems that plagued me. I didn’t have time to make a plan and now my plot was crumbling around me. They plagued me to the verge of ditching the whole thing in favour of writing the sequel to Technomancer I’ve been planning for a while.

But then last night I realised something. This is NaNoWriMo! It’s ok to change things on the fly if they’re not working. Main character sucks? Change them! Not enough pixies? Who said there had to be lots of pixies anyway? So I’ve made some changes to help me focus.

First, Pixies in Space is no longer called Pixies in Space. It’s now called Star Faering. No, it doesn’t sound as much fun as Pixies in Space ( 🙁 ), but I was too hung up on the pixies to just go wherever the story led me, so now I am free from them!

Second, my main pixie is no longer sheltered traditional flower fairy Foxglove Thistledown. He’s still there, but in a secondary role. Seriously, try describing a spaceship from the point of view of someone who has lived in one meadow their whole life. It’s hard! So the pixie lead is now taken by Fable, fairy engineer who seems a much better choice to tie the fantastical and technological world together. At least as a character she has a lot of knowledge about Fae and is allowed to use the word ‘pipe’ having actually seen them before.

Third, time travel is out. I spent ages trying to decide how I was going to do it, and have now settled on ‘not’. Huzzah! My mysterous passenger who was originally going to reveal herself as a time traveller now has a shiny new secret that fits much better.

I’m on 12,000 words, there’s 50 minutes until the online write-in, and I finally feel like I’ve got some direction with this. Here’s to another 1,000 words tonight!