Day 1 - "Eat a Sandwich"

I got in 4 pages today, which isn't exactly a world record, but also isn't too bad, considering I didn't get home tonight until quarter to midnight. I had a networking event and then hung out with some friends until pretty late, and while I like to pretend that I live minutes away from Manhattan, the reality is that it takes a while to get home to Brooklyn. Not forever, but a solid half hour at least.

Anyway, I haven't been writing that much lately since my muse went on hiatus, so it was good to get back into the groove of it all. I'd left off in the middle of a card game - I know, pretty random - and it was waaaaaaaay more difficult than usual to figure out where to go from there. And then I remembered something that happened in real life, and I knew exactly where I was going.

I should preface this story with a little bit of background information about my novel. Some of the characters (most of the characters actually) are musicians, and are playing a bunch of shows. So it's only fitting that some of my concert going/musical experiences would wind up entering my first draft.

Anyway, the inspiration came from the time I went to the MTVu Awards a few years ago. A band I really liked was playing, and I had actually gotten tickets for free solely to go see them. During the performance, the lead singer fell silent at the end of a song and a hush fell over the crowd. Well, most of the crowd. A lone voice called out, "You need to eat a f***ing sandwich, buddy!"

It was precisely this sentiment that motivated my novel's progress today. The idea of someone suggesting that perhaps the singer was too skinny introduced a new character into my novel, the Italian mother of the narrator, who believes her calling is to fatten up every skinny boy she meets, especially those her daughter is interested in. It ended up opening a lot of opportunities up for the later portion of my novel, allowing her mother to eventually have the chance to meet the boy (and a bunch of her other friends) and provide the support her daughter needs to make the right decisions. So all in all, someone yelling "Eat a Sandwich" resulted in an Italian mama in the kitchen of my fantasy world.

I'm still working on getting the balance right of description and action, since there's quite a bit of content, and I don't really want it to turn into a fictional character's diary. Hitting the main points while glossing over the unimportant parts is still an issue for me, but I'm learning. Hopefully, tomorrow will be more productive, but I'm really just glad I finally picked it back up today.

Keep you posted!