I had already committed myself to the July camp in 2020 as life had not really returned to normal and that became evident on July 9th when Melbourne was locked down once more in a lockdown that would last 111 days. It ended on the 27th of October, just before the November NaNoWriMo (although I think they only released it because the Christmas traders were getting antsy about potential sales and Australia Post was struggling to keep up with the packages, especially once rules such as the curfew were imposed (Yes, we were forbidden to leave the house after... I think it was 8pm, even to do something simple like walk the dog to the end of the street. There were helicopters in the sky every night, if I recall well.
Despite no lockdowns anymore, there were still some rules regarding how far you could stray from home, but there was one lovely day where we took our picnic lunch to the park and I brought my laptop and wrote in the company of my writing companion, Jasper. Anyway, lots of time to write and I had been writing continually, working hard on The Kahzer Chronicles as I had applied to and been successful with Mythrill, but I would take breaks from the work there to delve back into the "Eyes of Glass Universe" for Camp NaNoWriMo in July and returned back to The Kahzer Chronicles until NaNoWriMo 2020, when Eyes of Glass was continued.
I was heavily torn with what I wanted to do. Eyes of Glass is very much a trilogy (I sure hope it ends with the last one...) but there was a large cast of characters and I didn't necessarily want everyone involved in the second book. That wasn't to say that they weren't important, but new characters were being introduced. So I wanted to do a side story, a novella or novelette that followed some of those side characters who didn't get a part in the main storyline... Except I just couldn't find their voices. All I did in terms of what I was calling "Eyes Wide Open" was write and rewrite the the first couple of chapters. Changing which character it followed, first person, third person, diary entries (god, I hate that one! I never wrote a diary, so it's not something that comes naturally to me!), letters to other characters. All in all, it just kept holding me back because I'd get to a part in "Through the Eyes of Babes" and be like "But I have no idea, I haven't figured it out yet in the other one!" and it drove me crazy. Eventually I had to put "Eyes Wide Open" to the side, but I think I need to get back to it at some point, because the characters there do show up and help save the day at the end of "Through the Eyes of Babes" and it does need to make sense to someone other than me!
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