Daily Writing

Daily Writing Check-in: March 5, 2019

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Words/Time:  53 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.” (Same exact amount of time I spent yesterday…weird.)

Today I continued with reading the first draft of the book that was written during NaNoWriMo in 2015. It’s a pretty terrible first draft, even as first drafts go. I can tell I had no real focus, no solid plot. Just a few points to hit and a lot of boring stuff in between.

Developing sub-plots is going to be a necessary task for the development of this plot. The only one that exists right now involves nothing but a bunch of emo-fodder for the 2 secondary main characters. And then one of them said the most horrific line I’ve ever written (and I’ve written some doozies), and I just about gave up. I suppose it wasn’t what he said, but how he said it.

I also may be seeing some of the near-burn-out I experienced that year, which is just a sad thing to be able to feel in the writing. One of the reasons I’m reading through this is to remember the ideas I had for how the plot should go. Ideas that came up during writing, and thus can’t just be found in the original outline. Get the whole story fresh in my mind again. That part is working as intended.

The other reason, though, was to make note of any good spots–a good scene, good dialog, good paragraph, even just a good vague idea that I can use again. So far, not quite halfway through the draft…I’ve got nothing. So sad. But hey, I’m definitely learning what not to do in the next draft.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 4, 2019

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Words/Time:  53 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

For now, this work entails reading the first draft of the book that was written during NaNoWriMo in 2015. So far, I’m not particularly enjoying it, which is sad, but not surprising. In fact, of all of the 7 books I have planned, all of which have at least some version of a draft written, this is my least favorite. Not the story idea itself, but what has been written for it.

I think the main reason for this is that I wasn’t as prepared in advance of writing this as I prefer to be, so it’s very disjointed. (I’ve said this before and will say it again–I am not a pantser.) But as I’m reading, I’m realizing something else–my long-time two favorite characters, who play a secondary role in this book, are just…annoying. She keeps whining and he’s not really helping much either.

I am now 100% certain this book needs a complete rewrite, rather than a revision, and I fully expect to come out way ahead after doing that. I have literally just this moment decided that I am definitely going to write the new draft for this for Camp NaNoWriMo that starts in April. As long as the outline is done and I feel confident in the mystery set-up. So maybe this. This or “Unexpectedly.” Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just use Camp NaNo to push the amount of the same writing work that I do in a day. Wow, I just talked myself out of writing the first draft of this book over the course of writing this paragraph.

A Monday Moment: Mistaken Identity

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Natos had specifically chosen to spend that day alone, not wanting to get caught up in his brother’s chaos for once. He figured Jaffna would be safe, because he’d heard Acronis discuss heading to Taellyn with some of the others. As soon as he heard the giggle right behind him, he knew he should have gone to Qulu instead. His brother and the others would never bother with that remote location.

Despite hearing her coming, he wasn’t expecting the arms to wrap around his body from behind. He let out a startled yelp and pulled away, turning around quickly.

“Inanna!” he said with a gasp.

“Oh!” Her face turned bright red and she covered her cheeks with her hands. “I thought you were Acronis!”

“I gathered,” he muttered.

“I’m so sorry!”

“Right…well, it’s not a big deal.”

“Maybe not for you,” she said breathlessly. “You’re…Natos, right?”

He refrained from rolling his eyes as he nodded his head. It wasn’t that he minded that this rather attractive young woman preferred his brother to him. But despite how little he cared to hang out with his Acronis and the others, he had been around a lot when Acronis was in Jaffna and spent time with Inanna. Was it that hard to remember his name?

“Is Acronis here too?” she asked, looking around the area.

“I don’t think so. I heard them talking about going to Taellyn today.”

She stuck her bottom lip out. “What’s in Taellyn? Who is in Taellyn?”

Natos only shrugged. He couldn’t tell her what he was thinking. I couldn’t even begin to care. Why on earth do you want anything to do with my brother or those others that he spends all of his time with? What must be wrong with you that this is the kind of attention you want?

The truth was, he had always seen signs that Inanna’s family was not much better than his own. He felt bad for the girl, but on the other hand, at least her life was better than his. At least she wouldn’t be expected to become a mercenary and assassin, living in the shadows for the rest of her life, never having the chance to have real connections with others. He could only hope that she didn’t waste her freedom—that she would outgrow this fascination with his brothers and find some better friends.

Prompt used: What if your character was mistaken for someone else?

Daily Writing Check-in: March 3, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 36 minutes finishing item #2 in my current writing goals list, and starting on #3.

Finishing #2 entailed finishing the outline for “Unexpectedly.” There are 4 character arcs for this book that I am outlining individually from each other:
Juris
Evan
Acronis
Rusalki

Today I finished Evan’s section, and completely outlined Acronis’s and Rusalki’s. I also hit on an idea for how to start the entire novel, showing the connection between all 4 characters right away, before the narrator, Drear, splits off their stories. I still don’t know for sure if I want the stories to be told simultaneously or linearly, but I’m pretty excited to have the starting point.

Upon realizing that I’m progressing through my list of long-term writing goals much more quickly than I anticipated, I decided to start keeping track of how long each one took as I move on to #3. (This is a count of actual days worked, so not counting days where I skipped working on writing, or worked on something else.)

1. Outline “Outcast” – Time spent: 12 days

2. Outline “Unexpectedly” – Time spent: 7 days

3. Re-outline “The Seeger Book” – I wrote the first draft of this for NaNoWriMo in 2015. It was the 2nd book I wrote that month, and came in at 43,672 words. It is a murder-mystery, and only the 2nd one I have ever attempted (the 1st murder-mystery I ever wrote was earlier that month, and it really fell flat). It needs some overhauling and almost an entire mid-section, because I jumped from somewhere in the middle to the climax when the end of the month neared and I realized I was out of time to figure out the rest of the plot. I also think I need to re-think the suspects, clues, etc. of the mystery aspect.

4. Re-outline “Vin”

5. Re-outline “Protector”

I do expect #3 to take considerably longer than the other 2. The first draft was not very well planned, so I have a lot of work ahead of me to figure out how the story even needs to go. I’m starting with reading the first draft to remember all of my ideas. Unfortunately, it is still in full NaNo-form, because I didn’t touch it at all afterwards.

Sometimes I’ll spend the first few weeks after November ends doing a quick clean-up of what I wrote–mostly removing things I marked as NaNo fodder and at least doing a quick spell check. This is usually better to do while the story is still fresh, and then it’s good to let it sit for some time.

So I’ve already done a quick spell-check, and I’ll remove the NaNo fodder as I read.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 2, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 18 minutes working on the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

There are 4 character arcs for this book that I am outlining individually from each other:
Juris
Evan
Acronis
Rusalki

Today, I completed the outline for Juris and created more than half of the outline for Evan.

For Juris’s arc, Juris is actually not the main character. The story is mostly about a developing relationship, and is shown more from his love interest’s perspective. I wasn’t sure if that was the right way to go at first, because the idea of this book is to show the lives of 4 people who are on 2 different sides of the same war, and I’m really showing someone else’s life more than the life of the person who’s actually in the war. However, I like the way we learn who Juris is through the eyes of his love interest, and frankly, the drama is better this way.

For Evan’s arc, I am struggling with a psychological component near the end of his arc that I have to make sure to pull off correctly, to avoid leaving the reader guessing about something that I don’t intend to be confusing. I’ll tackle this fresh tomorrow.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 1, 2019

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Words/Time: 396 words of free writing.

I didn’t get to my writing time until 11:30, so I knew I wasn’t going to have an easy time getting into anything substantial. I figured this was a good time to do some free writing and try to come up with something for the next Monday Moment. I knew a prompt of some kind would help a lot in getting started quickly, so I went to a blog that I know has prompts every Friday. I looked through several of the Friday posts, looking for a prompt that sparked a quick idea, and weirdly ended up back at the prompt posted today.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 28, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

Most of this time was spent continuing the character interview that I started yesterday, and the rest was spent reading through most of the original, unfinished version of “Unexpectedly.” This particular conversation has reached its conclusion, and I am ready to proceed with the outline.

goal tracker 19-2-28
My writing-time goal in February was to average 30 minutes per day. I surpassed, even making up for several days here and there of not writing at all. I probably won’t set my daily goal higher for March, but with April comes Camp NaNoWriMo, so I may push myself more then. It’ll depend on what’s going on at work by then.

DailyTime-30min-DebbieOhi-200

Daily Writing Check-in: February 27, 2019

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Words/Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

I started out going over the broad plot points from the original version of “Unexpectedly,” marking out things I knew I wouldn’t keep. At that point, I realized that there were some things that happened that weren’t supported in the new world in which this story takes place. So I wrote out questions and brainstormed answers.

With those new answers in mind, I felt a little uncertain about the timeline of the first half of the story, so I decided it might be a good time to talk to the 2 leads in this section of the book. I didn’t go into this character interview with specific questions, like I normally do, but the discussion so far has cleared up some questions I didn’t even know I had, which is what I suspected would happen. I will continue the interview tomorrow.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 26, 2019

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Words/Time: 37 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

In many ways, as I realized today, I have been already working on the outline for this book. It started with just listing thoughts for each of the 4 main characters that were going to be in the book, but I wrote out those notes in a very similar format to how I usually write my outlines. So now it’s a matter of putting them into Scrivener, scene by scene.

Actually, I realized at the end of my time today that before I do that, I need to go back to the original writing of “Unexpectedly” and figure out what of that story is worth keeping and what isn’t helpful to this book.

See, originally, this story was written as fanfiction for an MMORPG I used to play called Ragnarok Online. It was one of the last stories I was working on when I decided to stop writing fanfiction and either write something original or stop writing. It was the only story I never finished in that format. It was basically pure romance.

The secondary main character in that story will be one of the 4 main characters in the new book. And the focus is on the lives of all 4 people, who are all involved in a small-scale civil war. So his story will only be (approximately) 1/4 of the entire thing. Add to that the fact that the original version was told mostly from the PoV of his romantic partner, and a lot of the original story is going to be extemporaneous. So tomorrow, I need to go through the original story and decide what to keep and what to cut.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 25, 2019

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Words/Time: 46 minutes doing preliminary work for the outline of “Unexpectedly.”

The structure I’m tentatively going with for this story is that there are 4 characters whose lives will be shown, mostly before and leading up to the war that they are all involved in, and a little after. Two of these characters are on the “good guys” side, and two are on the “bad guys” side.

I truly thought that I would have a lot more story for the good guys than for the bad guys, and wasn’t sure if that was okay or not. But I have so far written out the very broad plot points for 3 of the 4 characters, one of the being one of the bad guys, and so far, I have more written down for one of the bad guys than the 2 good guys. I have to keep in mind, though, that one of the good guys’ notes may be deceptively short, because I know his story better than the others already, so I don’t think I wrote as much detail for his, because I figured I knew it all already.

Either way, I’m pleased with the ideas I’ve come up with for the bad guys, and tomorrow will try to finish my notes for the 4th bad guy (the leader of all of the bad guys, in fact). Though she’s one of my oldest characters, her life outside of how she villainizes some of my main characters is very shallow. So it will take some work to come up with just the right story for her.

I also still need to figure out how I want to structure this story. I know I don’t want to just tell the entire story of 1 person, then the entire story of another, etc. But how do I intermix them? I don’t have any clue yet.