Don’t worry, dear Cadbury factory, you won’t be going broke: it appears that I will be allowed to eat chocolate again. My second novel is finally on a bit of a roll.

On Saturday night, in front of a TV show, curiously, because my concentration doesn’t normally work that well there, I got some notes down about the key characters in my second novel, the whole point and theme of the novel, and how I can structure it. For some time I’ve wanted to write it from several first person points of view, with alternating chapters. And I think that’s going to work really well with the three very different characters I have. I didn’t really enjoy writing my first novel in third person, but I felt like I had to do it to disconnect myself from the story more, and let the plot have its own life away from my own experiences. But this novel is much less based on my own experiences, and the three different characters are all unique enough to have their own voice, I think.

Yesterday I sat down and got started on the first chapter, and pretty much a full draft of it done, too. Who knows if it will really end up this way, but I decided to try starting the first chapter in the present, with each of the three voices represented, so that all the characters are introduced at first. Then from the second chapter it’s going to trek back to some point in the past, and gradually be brought back to the present, one chapter by one character at a time. Quite how it will all end up is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment but I have faith that somehow the characters will work that out for me. I mean, I know what I want to say with it all, but just quite what happens when the characters’ stories meet up with the present again is, well, a bit up in the air.

The really dumb thing is that once I sat down to do it, it was all surprisingly easy. Here’s the dilemma though: is that because, during this period of procrastination, my sub-conscious was actually working out all these ideas for me? Or was it always going to be this easy, and if I’d got this chapter done a month ago then I’d have half the novel finished now? I need a parallel universe to figure that one out.

In any case, since this seems to be so fun to write, I’m thinking I’m going to have to change my year’s writing plans. I’d always planned to plot out this novel in great detail and have it ready to write in the 2008 NaNoWriMo, but November is still half a year away, almost. Could this mean that I could get this novel done before then, and draft novel number three during NaNoWriMo? Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself and I should just concentrate on getting chapter one finished to a standard that I’m satisfied with, before the Writing Show contest deadline, which is extraordinarily close. Yep, I’m pretty sure I’m going all over-confident there. Back to the drawing board.