Daily Writing Check-in: October 13, 2017

October 13, 2017November 7, 2018 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 0

I don’t normally post if I didn’t do any writing work for the day, but I decided to today. It’s the first time I’ve done no writing work since I started posting again recently, and it wasn’t intentional. I forgot I had to work this evening, and didn’t find out until 2 hours before I had to leave. I didn’t get home until 11:30pm, and had to get supper and do a little follow-up for my job.

I will do extra tomorrow, not because I have to (I’m still about on par for my goal of averaging an hour a day for the rest of the month), but because I want to. And that is important to me right now–I am finally wanting to write, plan, dream every day again, which I haven’t felt for a year and a half.

Today was day 7, but I didn’t get the screenshot until after midnight, so it shows day 8 too.

Truth be told, in a way I guess I do “need” to do extra tomorrow, since I’m still woefully unprepared for November. This novel feels so out of my reach…or more accurately, the main character feels out of my reach. There’s still so much to discover.

For anyone out there who is participating in NaNoWriMo, feel free to check out my series of tips and tricks for the month, and also to add me as a writing buddy! (Let me know you came from here, and I’ll add you back!)

Daily Writing Check-in: October 12, 2017

October 12, 2017October 13, 2017 / Kristi / 2 Comments

Words/Time: 1047 words

I answered the first 17 questions from this list, with Vin in mind. I think he has sufficiently changed even from the realization I gained about him 2 days ago. I had motivation for his actions, but even those turned out to be shallow. Unfortunately, the more I discover about him, the more I fear that I will be unable to write him well.

Daily Writing Check-in: October 11, 2017

October 11, 2017 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: Just over an hour working on NaNoPrep

I have officially settled on what to write for NaNoWriMo this year. I posted the mood board for it yesterday, but I still have a lot of the discovery phase to work through before I’m ready for November. I have never thought much in depth about this story idea.

After finally looking into what this “Beautiful Books” thing is that I’ve seen so many times, I realized learning what it was couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. For those who don’t know, you can find out here.

I answered the questions as a way of learning more about this story, and about the main character, and boy did it help (that’s what I did for my hour of work today). I will post more about that tomorrow though. Yesterday, I mentioned that, along with the mood board, I created a cover for my novel. I don’t normally do that. Only once before in my 7 previous years of participating in NaNoWriMo have I made a cover, and it was just a close-up picture of a forge.

I always assumed covers had to be complicated and fancy, but I got smarter. Here is the NaNoCover for my 2017 NaNoNovel, “Vin.”

Vin cover.png

Daily Writing Check-in: October 10, 2017

October 10, 2017October 3, 2025 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 104 words written and 1 hour, 27 minutes worked

I finished the little bit of writing about a possible primary character for a possible NaNoNovel, because I didn’t want to leave it hanging.

Then I decided to try my hand at making a mood board of sorts. I’ve never done anything like this before, outside of designing the icon for my story blog and, in a similar vein, the working cover for “Pithea.” I am not much for visual arts overall. But I thought it would help to solidify this story as what I wanted to write for NaNo, and it did. So I spent almost an hour and a half finding pictures, and then building this fancy layout. I also created a cover for the NaNo site, which I’ll post more about tomorrow. Again, I’m not much of a visual creator, so keep that in mind. It’s more about the themes, moods, and actions this board brings about:

Vin moodboard

Daily Writing Check-in: October 9, 2017

October 9, 2017October 9, 2017 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 78 words written.

And no amount of NaNoPrep, and I’m not even bothered by it. It puts me below par in my goal for this month, but it just wasn’t going to happen tonight. This is my first time trying to get back to a writing habit for a year and a half, and the family situation and bedtime rituals are different than they were that long ago. My biggest obstacle from now on is going to be just getting to my writing time. However, since I’m a night owl, I will probably do some prep work after midnight, and count it for tomorrow. Maybe that’s how my whole NaNo will go too.

Last night I had a sudden idea about what I might write for NaNo, and it’s not one of the options I laid out for myself a few days ago. But it might just be what I need to write next, so my writing today was while I was waiting for a work meeting to start, as I decided to delve into the mind of one of the primary characters of that story. (So I guess it was a little bit of prep work! It’s going on the goal tracker!)

Daily Writing Check-in: October 8, 2017

October 8, 2017January 28, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 330 words of free writing, followed by 14 minutes of NaNoPrep work.

A few days ago I read a post on a site I have really come to like, and the author had given a word list as a way to inspire some writing. I’ve been wanting to do some free writing alongside my NaNoPrep since I returned to writing a few days ago, but haven’t had a chance to go and dig out my various ways to begin free writing. Word lists have always been a favorite type of writing prompt for me, and today was no exception.

Then I opened my “Pursuit of Power” outline in Scrivener and started looking at what it would be like to cut out the first 1/4 of the story, so the true plot for this book could get started a lot sooner. I also plan to incorporate a character who’s supposed to be a secondary main character in the story more, so I’ve been toying with the idea of starting the story more from her perspective. I didn’t get real far, because I got to my writing late today, but at least it’s something.

Daily Writing Check-in: October 7, 2017

October 7, 2017May 6, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 2:17 hours finishing the 2 mini projects I started in the last 2 days.

So I got 2 stories into my timeline that weren’t there, one of which took some serious fitting in. And then I continued figuring out who I wanted to age 3 years, and who needed a different amount for whatever reason.

Now that these annoying issues are done and fixed, tomorrow I will go back to looking at the post-first-draft outline of “Pursuit of Power” and see what scenes need to be held over for a future book and which ones are important for the real story of this first book. Hopefully I’ll be left with a decent-length book when I’m done. And hopefully this will help me decide what to write for NaNoWriMo.

NaNo After November

October 7, 2017January 1, 2019 / Kristi / 2 Comments

Did anyone else see this?

There is a feature on the NaNoWriMo website where you can track writing goals any time you want! According to my NaNoMail, this was announced this year in May, but I don’t always read all of the mail they send outside of November, even less so when I’m living in a cave.

You pick a start date and a stop date (up to a 100-day range), and set your own goal, which can be a word count, or an amount of hours worked. Then when you click create, this is what you have:

I have seen many ways that writers try to keep track of their progress toward a goal, from Excel spreadsheets to filling in a calendar (well, maybe not that many ways…mostly just a lot of variations of spreadsheets). I used Final Deadline after NaNo in 2013 to set myself a goal for finishing the novel I started that month, and I know that without a tangible goal, I would not have finished my very first novel draft 3 months after NaNo ended.

Just like NaNoWriMo doesn’t work for everyone, continuing to track goals and fill in a chart during non-NaNo months might not be something even every Wrimo will want to do.

But for the rest of us, this is a really helpful addition to the NaNo website. I’ve already created a project to help me keep moving on my NaNoPrep this month. Since I started with it a few days ago, I haven’t felt any lack of motivation, but it could definitely still happen. (Though so far the fear of not being ready at all when November 1st comes is keeping me going.)

Besides, I always love watching the graph climb higher during NaNo…it appeals to some specific part of my brain. So I’ve set a goal that will average out to 1 hour of prep work per day for the rest of the month, and we’ll see how this goes.

(I don’t know why my graph has those flat spots. That is the “par” line, and twice it keeps the same amount of hours for 2 straight days, then jumps 2 hours for the next day. I don’t know if it’s a glitch or something they built in that I just don’t know about.)

What do you think about this feature? Do you plan to make use of it or give it a pass?

Daily Writing Check-in: October 6, 2017

October 6, 2017May 6, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 1.5 hours going down all sorts of rabbit trails.

Every day, the work that I do to bring me closer to a decision for NaNoWriMo only seems to lead me further away. Yesterday, I talked about aging all of my characters by a few years. But I had to go through each character who was important enough to be on the timeline with a birthday (or at least birth month), so that I could remember approximately how old they are. This leaves me with 26 characters who are in the 5 books that I’m tracking on my timeline enough to put them on the timeline (usually it means they show up more than once, with enough time between appearances that I want to be sure to write them according to their age).

Each of these characters I felt the need to decide individually if they would be aged 3 years, or less, or none. One-third of the way through, I questioned if I should have just aged them all 3 years and worried about if someone’s age was wrong in general later, but this has brought up a whole other issue. Two storylines I have planned and at least partially outlined/written do not line up, time-wise, at all. It’s not exactly surprising, since neither of them have been actually entered into the timeline–their arcs are listed, but I hadn’t gotten around to figuring out the times.

So now I’m doing that. There’s one big event that affects most of these stories in some way that I have to make sure occurs at the right time for all of them, and if I mess that up, I could seriously mess up the drafts of whatever I write in the future. So yeah, at least an hour of this time was putting events into a timeline, and I have more to do. Whatever decision I come to about what to write for NaNoWriMo sure will be a hard-fought one.

Daily Writing Check-in: October 5, 2017

October 5, 2017October 7, 2017 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 1 hour, which started with looking over the outline I made in Scrivener for “Pursuit of Power” when I tried to start revising it last year. I got distracted from that by a thought that I’ve been musing over for the last few days and decided if I was going to do it, now would be the time.

I’m aging most of the people in my stories by 3 years. The main characters in the stories I’ve written so far have been around 15-17 years old. The original reason for their ages was due to the fanfiction world this all started in, but I didn’t have any reason to change this before. After all, the beginning of “Pithea” shows the main characters basically just getting started in life. However, I have recently realized that there are plenty of reasons to add some years to their lives.

Even though this is set in a world that is vastly safer than ours (less crime, anyway), the characters are still out on their own a lot more than I would expect a bunch of 15-year-olds to be, even traveling from town to town on their own.
Folks live longer in my story world than they do in real life–not by a lot, but average live span is 25-50 years longer. It stands to reason that kids wouldn’t be pushed into starting their lives as early as I’d made it (14).
I didn’t care for the way the romance felt in some of my stories, when characters were only 16 and falling in love. It isn’t meant to be teenage romance, at least one in particular; it’s meant to be viewed as real, long-lasting. But at least one of my beta readers had a hard time accepting it, because of their age, and she had a point.
I don’t consider this overall series of stories to be YA, but because the book that will likely be the introduction to the entire rest of the series has 2 main characters who start off at 15 years old, it would be hard to convince anyone that the book belonged anywhere but the YA section. It’s not that I plan to have adult situations or coarse language, but the characters grow up, and in another book, are in their 20s. Very likely there will be main characters in their 30s at some point. Aging the main characters to 18 at the start of that cornerstone book will hopefully help with this issue.

So now I’m going through all of my characters who are important enough to be listed in my timeline with an official age (birth month, at least) and figuring out who should be aged forward, and how much. Someone who is in the story as a 62-year-old man, for example, may not be worth changing. And this is what I spent most of the hour on.

You know, my daily challenge check-ins never used to be this detailed.

All of this is because I’m trying to figure out if I should write the continuation of “Pursuit of Power” for NaNoWriMo or not. Aging my characters 3 years does not bring me any closer to that decision.