Time worked: :40
Work done: Back to revising with an eye for lacking details and descriptions. Once again, I got very little done during the time I worked.
Daily Writing
July 2
Time worked: :20
Work done: More perusing of character traits that I hope to find a better way to show in the current version of “Adventures in Pithea”.
July 1
Time worked: 2:00
Work done: Skimming through the original stories that “Adventures in Pithea” spawned from to find dialog and actions that more clearly defines some of the side characters in AiP who aren’t coming across like I want them.
June 16
Time worked: ≈1:00
Work done: Some writing practice, that ended up being an advertisement for the island my stories take place on, Pithea, but from over a thousand years ago, when it was a tourist destination. Also some work on editing in part 3, where one of my sisters is reading and making suggestions.
June 3
Time worked: :55
Work done: Revising & rewriting “Adventures in Pithea.” Got through a few pages, then went back to see if there was anything I missed. This is going to be a loooooooooooong process.
June 2
Time worked: 1:00
Work done: Revising & rewriting “Adventures in Pithea.” I really don’t know how people do this. It took that whole hour to rewrite 4 paragraphs to make them more descriptive and, I feel, stronger. I’m exhausted just thinking about how long it will take me to do so with the rest of the book.
June 1
Time worked: 1:57
Work done: Writing new scenes for the story that I’ve marked as being needed, but hadn’t written yet. Compared to how much I can write in 2 hours during NaNoWriMo, that was actually pathetic, but…NaNo’s different.
There may be no events going on, and no fun websites to keep track of my progress or give me goodies if I win, but I still wanted to tally up my total hours for the month of May. I worked 24 hours and 57 minutes for the whole month. That comes to an average of 48 minutes a day. Considering that during April, while participating in Camp NaNo, I wrote 30.5 hours the whole month, I’d say that’s not too bad for needing to self-motivate!
May 30
Time worked: :20
Work done: Started in on chapter 1 with the revising again, with new guidelines. I didn’t get far, though, because I was just too tired.
May 29
Time worked: 1:18
Work done: I spent this time working on a new way to revise my story. I’m not stalling, despite how much I’ve said I dislike revising (I’d admit it if I was), but I’ve realized I might not have gone about the revising correctly. I understand that I’m only going on other people’s opinions here, but I spent some time reading about various writing topics, and some of it was about revising. More than one source mentioned that there is micro editing and macro editing. The macro editing makes more sense to come first, and I actually sort of skipped that. I went first to the line editing and more specific stuff–not on purpose, but because it was easier to start there. I realize now that I’ve ignored bigger issues like descriptions and fleshing out characters and making sure scenes flowed smoothly. I mean, I knew I was lacking those areas, thanks to alpha readers who are pointing these issues out to me. However, I figured I’d fix them along the way in this second read-through. Now I’ve realized that my second read-through really needs to focus on those things. I want to take one scene at a time and go through a list of questions–Is there some aspect of the character that should/can be described here? (Physical aspects are what I’m lacking most, but even other things too, like mental ticks.) Do the characters move at all while they’re talking, or are they standing around with their arms at their sides, stiff as a board? Have I given the senses something to do during this scene? Is the narrator’s voice heard here, or does he sound too much like a third-person objective observer? (That will happen plenty too, I’m sure, but I want to make sure to remind the reader often enough that he’s actually a real character himself, and that these people, this country, and this world are personal to him.
These are things I’ve never really went in search of, just hoped that I did it okay the first time, or that I realized it needed work while absently reading through the story. This is the first time I’ll be seeking them out, and I hope it doesn’t make me too crazy.
May 28
Time worked: :57
Work done: Proofreading and revising of Adventures in Pithea. I made it through the prologue and 2 chapters tonight. I can’t help but feel like I’m being too easy on myself, especially whenever I go half a page without making any edits. I feel like I’m probably missing a lot of glaring mistakes or just bad spots. Hopefully others who read the early drafts will be more picky than I seem to be.
A Journey of Words 