Progress

Classes are done in about two weeks or so for the semester. Hopefully I pull off those B's. I think I will. Burnout is setting in, big time, and it's a struggle to get each assignment done. Hopefully the three weeks or so I have off will allow me to recharge batteries enough to get through another (then another, then another, etc.)

Five more semesters to go after this one.

Anyway, since time is freeing up near the end of the semester, I've had the opportunity to get back to doing some real writing (as opposed to bullshit, "look what I can do," course papers) and have dove back into Charlie Morning and Mr. Night. I made fantastic progress yesterday--got almost 2,000 words written in the space of an hour and a half, and then managed to completely outline the rest of the book. I'm confident that with just a bit of due diligence I'll have the draft completed by the end of December. Thank God for the Beehive. I'm not sure where my writing would be without it. I have a hard time writing at home, and my current job just doesn't have the atmosphere for it, even during down time. The muse doesn't come here. She does, however, show up at the Beehive (as well as at very inopportune moments like when I'm driving somewhere and unable to put keys to screen, or fingers to keys, or whatever the modern version of pen-to-paper is).

The story so far, for those who haven't been keeping up:

Our heroine, young Becky Bradford, has been chosen to champion the children of the world in a contest that has gone on for thousands of years. This contest is played between the Prince of the Seelie Court (currently called Charlie Morning) and the Goblin Prince of the Unseelie Court (currently known as Mr. Night). Mr. Night wishes to turn all children into Bogies--goblins. Charlie Morning wants to protect them. Each gets to pick a champion who does battle in a fantasy land, but this time Mr. Night has challenged Charlie Morning to play in the real world, so Charlie chose as his champion a girl who can create her own fantasy worlds--a girl diagnosed with childhood onset schizophrenia.

Mr. Night has played the game well and deadly, leading Charlie to cheat several times to help Becky where he wasn't allowed. This has resulted in Charlie's imprisonment and torture within Mr. Night's castle, and Mr. Night choosing two new champions to face Becky. One has been revealed as Becky's former best friend Veronica (Roni); the other has yet to be revealed.

Becky, lost and alone, has tracked down two former champions--an old woman named Susan whom Becky helped come out of a sixty-year catatonia, and a sixty-odd-year-old priest named Father Bastian, whom Becky has known since she was a baby. Together with a young Asperger's boy named Galen, they escaped an assault by Mr. Night's bogie forces to what once was a fantasy world where Susan fought her own battle, but is now simply known as the Abandoned Wastes of Na'ra.

Through dreams, Becky has surmised that Charlie Morning is being held prisoner and resolved to rescue him. She is certain that there is a portal from the Wastes to wherever Charlie is being held, and as this is her game the others are bound to follow her lead.

Meanwhile, Roni and her sidekick, the Bogie Tommy Myers, have arrived in the Wastes and are chasing Becky and her fellowship, while a third faction, a dragon and the dwarves who control all the remaining water in the Wastes, have begun to plot how they can use these developments to escape the Hell in which they've been imprisoned for thousands of years...

...but that's all you get for now. The rest exists only in outline form and won't be summarized until it's written (and perhaps not even then; I mean, I want you to buy the book, after all!)