Daily Writing Check-in: March 31, 2019

March 31, 2019April 4, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 20 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

I continued my conversation with Jonathan about the events of this story, which I had not finished at the point that I took an unplanned break. The conversation is still proving very insightful, though I think its usefulness is coming to an end. Not because I have the events figured out, but because I’ve run up against the big, empty 2nd half of act 2 & beginning of act 3. The same late mid-section that I left empty in the first draft of this book. I just feel like there’s something missing, but I haven’t hit on what it is yet.

I don’t know if this means I’ll need to do some more broad brainstorming, or if I need to pick a different character to interview, or if I just need to let it sit for a while. Or even if I need to go ahead and write the outline I have so far, and even draft it from that, and see if more plot points come up during the actual writing (it happens a lot for me). It will be difficult to even decide where to go next.

It has not been the most stellar month of writing for me, but I’m really glad I had enough self-motivation to get even 20 minutes in today. Since I officially quit my job 2 weeks ago, but agreed to stay on to help finish a huge project and train other people, things have actually gotten worse at my job. I have taken refuge in the game Stardew Valley most evenings as a coping mechanism. As much as I’d rather say I use my writing, story world, characters, etc. as a coping mechanism…this is just too much to cope with.

Camp NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and I hope to be able to push past my emotional and mental issues caused by work, and be able work on my writing every day this month, with an ultimate goal of an average of an hour a day. I know that might be unrealistic at this time, but if I don’t set my goal higher than what I do outside of Camp, then it’s almost pointless to participate. I’m also well aware that I might end up crashing and burning in this attempt, but it’s worth trying.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 10, 2019

March 10, 2019May 24, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 25 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

I continued my conversation with Jonathan, talking through the major players who are working against him in this story. I think we have them straightened out, so tomorrow, we’ll start focusing on the events. I may be ready to work on the outline relatively soon.

I didn’t do any work yesterday, because I just didn’t have the desire to do it. I’ve learned in the past that if I push past a strong feeling to not work on writing, it can lead to burn-out (in fact, it was NaNoWriMo 2015, when the first draft of this story was terribly written, that I learned that lesson). It can be a delicate balance, because if I just ignore my writing for too long, I can end up in a months- or even years-long slump, but I knew I was still enjoying doing the work, just didn’t feel up to it yesterday.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 8, 2019

March 8, 2019March 8, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 1 hour, 5 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

I finished reading the first draft of the book that was written during NaNoWriMo in 2015. I actually did that yesterday; it took me 8 minutes before I went to bed. Then yesterday, my husband and I went to a concert and we’re home until after midnight, so I didn’t do any other work, and decided it wasn’t worth typing up a post for 8 minutes worth.

The rest of the time was spent, both before I went to bed this morning, as well as this evening, having my first one-on-one conversation with the main character of this book–Jonathan. He’s been included in a group discussion in the past, but I needed some time alone with him to try to get a handle on this plot. It’s kind of all over the place. We’re making progress, but I anticipate this conversation lasting several days.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 6, 2019

March 6, 2019May 24, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

Today I continued with reading the first draft of the book that was written during NaNoWriMo in 2015. I’m near the end and plan to finish it as soon as I have posted this.

For the last 2 days, I complained about how bad this was, and today was no better. But reading the climax, and reading through the last 6500 words of the draft, which was really just my “out-loud” brainstorming what I was missing in the story, so I wouldn’t forget my thoughts in the future, I at least remember why I was excited about this story in the first place. Which is a great place to be when starting to work on the new outline.

The main thing I’m learning from the jumbled mess I’m reading, though, is that I don’t really need to try to hold very strictly to what was already written…because I clearly had no clue how I wanted the story to go. So I might as well start from scratch with the very vague idea of the Seeger Book being at the heart of a murder-mystery. The culprit will be the same, and that’s pretty much it.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019March 5, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

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

March 4, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

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.

Daily Writing Check-in: March 3, 2019

March 3, 2019April 29, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

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 2^nd book I wrote that month, and came in at 43,672 words. It is a murder-mystery, and only the 2^nd one I have ever attempted (the 1^st 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: February 28, 2019

February 28, 2019March 1, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

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.

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.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 22, 2019

February 22, 2019February 23, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 35 minutes working on the outline for “Outcast.”

After working on lining up the 2 storylines of this book in Scrivener for 35 minutes, I realized that it may not be possible to match them up yet. When I wrote the original version of this story, I wrote the storylines separately, and then lined them up afterward, breaking them into chapters at that time.

I’ve seen over the years that other writers can estimate how long their planned scenes will be (by word count), can know in advance where chapter breaks will be, and other things like that. I’ve never been great at any of that. It’s easier to me to just write the full story as it comes and break it up later. I’m putting a hold on trying to line up the storylines now, because I do think it will be a waste of time.

This means that, unless tomorrow reveals something I am not thinking of now, I have completed #1 on my current list of writing goals, and frankly, much more quickly than I expected.

Daily Writing Check-in: February 21, 2019

February 21, 2019May 31, 2019 / Kristi / Leave a comment

Words/Time: 1 hour, 19 minutes working on the outline for “Outcast.”

It took some doing, but I finished the outline for the 2nd storyline. I had to hash out a few more questions, mostly about how to get the right people to the final location for the storyline. I also had to go back to previous conversations I’ve had with certain characters to make sure I remembered correctly how the final scene should go.

I also made the mistake of looking up something in “Vin,” which turned into just reading for several minutes. Maybe this sounds strange to be so surprised about, but even though I wrote it during NaNoWriMo, and it needs a lot of work, I have a difficult time pulling myself away from “Vin” if I start to read any part of it.

Tomorrow I plan to start putting the outline into Scrivener, broken into scenes as best as I can plan them, to see how the storylines will match up.