Writing accountability: So, Lori and I decided to meet up on weekdays to try and keep each other writing. Initially, my goals are very modest — write SOME fiction. A sentence counts. We’re meeting to check in at the start of the hour, and again to check out an hour later. So far, so good.
I didn’t want to try to coordinate with more than one other person, but if anyone else wants to do it virtually with us, I’m going to try to keep these posts going for a month at least, feel free to drop your writing accountability notes in the comments. 🙂
*****
Tues, Jan 9. Met Lori at 8 a.m. (need to work my way back to an earlier start time, got on a later schedule over break), wrote for about 40 minutes, 571 words. New scene in middle-grade fantasy novel.
“Nandini had only visited once, before she’d abandoned school, abandoned all of them, to run off and join the guerrilla fighters, the Tamil Tigers. Amma cried all the time that year, and Genisha and Shanthi tried to creep around the house like quiet mice, so as not to upset her more.”
*****
The book is currently set in Sri Lanka, in 2016. I need it to be after the conflict ends, but not too long after. Which is fine, but I’m realizing I need more info about daily life in my characters’ social class. I’m pretty sure I’m getting some details wrong right now, but I’m trying to just write through it, and figure I’ll fix it later.
My mother’s family is from Negombo, but my memories of visiting them are from too long ago — for instance, when I went as a child (in, say, the early 1980s), and wanted to take a shower, they went to the well and got water, and then brought back buckets of water to dump over my head. I’m pretty sure that by 2016, that would have changed?
Well, since I’m here, the protagonist is a 12-year-old girl; her father is a college professor and her mother is a preschool teacher. They have a small one-story house in Negombo. If any of my Sri Lankan friends can tell me if they’d likely have a shower with running hot and cold water in 2016, that’d be great. 🙂