So this is when it gets hard.  That didn’t take long.

I just finished the second chapter, and boy was it a tough one.  My main character gets put on trial for something she didn’t do, and things have to get really bad in order to get her in the right place to make the rest of the novel happen.  I spent the last two days putting it off, either not writing at all or writing things that weren’t the actual trial.

As it turns out, I hate the idea of writing dialogue for characters I don’t like, especially when they’re doing bad things to my protagonist.  The scene required Bad People to do and say Bad Things, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make it happen.  (I even invented a new character so that my other main character would have someone reasonable to talk to while witnessing the whole thing.)  Fortunately, once I realized this, I did what any good WriMo writer would do: I called in the space monkeys.

You laugh, but it worked.  Space monkeys attacked and destroyed the courtroom halfway through the second chapter, and the heroine escaped with the help of a dashing but mysterious stranger.  I wrote like that for a handful of paragraphs, and then it wasn’t necessary anymore.  The sheer idiocy of it freed me up to write the scene I had been dreading, and the threat of further space monkey invasions let me write it the way I needed to instead of in the style I had assumed I would have to.

So now I’m at the end of the Dread Chapter of Doom, and things are looking up.  Let’s hope it’s just as easy to write about the heroine escaping with the help of a portly but mildly annoying stranger.