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Risk and Drama

I made it through Easter weekend. I don’t have a lot of voice left, but I get a break this week because the choir isn’t singing Sunday. My children’s choir is, so I still have to deal with it, but I don’t have to use my voice (other than for scolding naughty kids). I’ve also already done the post-Easter Target chocolate run, and I seem to have been over-eager about that because the discount wasn’t yet in the system and the cashier had to do it manually.

Now for the rest of the day I need to settle in and get caught up on things. The to-do list is getting intimidating.

I’m still working out what the rest of this book needs to be, finding plot reasons for the “wouldn’t it be cool if …” scenes, working the new characters who’ve come up during writing into the already planned scenes. I think part of my problem is that my original plan didn’t actually have any conflict through most of the story, until we got near the end and found out what was really going on. I need to find a way to bring some of that conflict forward. That’s really tricky because I was kind of enjoying just going along and discovering things. I like low-conflict stories. Unfortunately, you can’t really sell those. I need to find a middle ground between “just enjoying this interesting place and these people” and “everyone is in mortal peril and the fate of the entire world is at stake.”

I actually had to put a book I was reading this weekend down because it was too much for me. The characters kept doing dumb things, sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for Reasons (because the author needed it for the plot to work), and I just couldn’t take it. It didn’t help that a lot of the dumb things involved gambling, and for some reason, that’s a real hot button for me. I can’t deal with stories about gambling. I’m not sure why. I guess I just think it’s a huge waste of money. Gamblers enjoy it because they feel like they’re going to win and come out ahead, but I see it as you’re most likely to lose it all, so it’s not fun, and it’s stressful to read about. The book description did mention gambling, but I thought it was mostly the setup, and it turned out to be the core of the story.

Meanwhile, I suspect there will be a lot of stress knitting going on during next week’s Game of Thrones episode. I almost can’t bear to watch. I wonder if maybe I should wait and read spoilers and then watch so I can brace myself.

So, yeah, I need to moderate my risk aversion in order to get a good story, even if I don’t have to take it quite that far.

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