First Draft, Day One.

Today is the day!
I'm off to great places!
I'm off and away!

Sorry. I can rarely resist an urge to quote paraphrase Dr. Seuss. (That poem was read as part of our wedding ceremony.)

I'm mixing it up a bit this time around. In The Weekend Novelist, Ray suggests taking the first six weeks of the first draft to write the six key scenes (opening, plot point one, mid-point, plot point two, climax, and closing). I have always been a linear thinker and writer, so I immediately pushed this idea aside as Not For Me. But it stuck with me, and more and more I've come around to thinking that as someone who has trouble keeping her plot ducks in a row, this might actually be tailor-made for me. So I'm giving it a try. I'm going to take eight weeks because I have eight key scenes; my climax scene is really three scenes that wrap up the three plot layers one at a time.

Step one in this process is to complete the scene sheet, so this afternoon I sat down with my laptop and my notebook and cards and worksheets, and wrote down everything I could think of that belongs in the opening.

And I picked a working title: The Shadow Emissary won out at the eleventh hour. (I considered changing it to The Sixth Emissary, but then I tried saying that out loud without lisping and thought again.) I don't love it-- it's like too goth or something--  but it'll do for now.

So The Novel Known as New Project, or NP, will henceforth be referred to as The Shadow Emissary, or TSE.