Plotting.

"Ruby Red and the Robot."

5000 words winging it, which is the freedom you have when you start a story. But now I'm realizing I'm going to need to plot this out a bit more. For one thing, I have only two characters and that's not enough. For another, there is an action scene in the first chapter, but none in the next two chapters, which means I need to concoct a couple of scenes.

Plus the motivation. I have a general idea that Ruby's robot companion, Antony, is the McGuffin. The thing everyone is looking for. But meanwhile, I have Ruby find a computer disk early one, which she uses as an excuse to go looking for the fabled place her father talked about.

But since the computer disk was picked up at random from a dead guy, why would it be significant? What would be the odds?

So as a red herring, it might work, but why would Ruby need a red herring? Perhaps she knows more about Antony than she's willing to admit (hard to do when it's first person narration) and she's trying to protect him.

And so it goes...

When I first came back to writing, I had a hard rule not to change anything until the book was finished. But I'm allowing myself some mid-course corrections these days. Dangerous, but...