revision

Daily Writing Check-in: June 17, 2019

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Words/Time:  2 hours, 20 minutes reading through “Pithea.” for any further changes to be made to the final draft.

I am through page 379 of 467. I have actually found a few smallish, but glaring, plot holes that were missed during previous revisions, including a hefty, year-long revision by 2 of my sisters and myself. It doesn’t surprise me that we missed them, because of how long it took us to get through the book. Details were forgotten. But I am surprised I missed them in the 2-3 times I’ve read through it since then. I’m just glad I caught them now.

I’m into part 4 (the final part) of the book, and based on the average pace I’ve read this time through, I should be able to finish it in about an hour and a half. I expect to be done tomorrow.

Daily Writing Check-in: June 16, 2019

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Words/Time:  2 hours, 16 minutes reading through “Pithea.” for any further changes to be made to the final draft.

I am through page 244 of 467. I made a few small changes, including changing the timeline just a smidge. I’m a bit more than halfway through the book now, and estimate another 3.75 hours to finish it. I’m going to push myself the next few days to try to get it done in 2-3 days, but real life may flood in and slow me down.

Daily Writing Check-in: June 15, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 24 minutes reading through “Pithea.” for any further changes to be made to the final draft.

I am through page 101 of 468. I did make a few small changes, and changed the name of a character ever so slightly.

My pace today was a page a minute, so at that pace, it will take me approximately 6 hours to finish the book. That will most likely take anywhere from 3-7 days. After that…it’s time to delve back into the scary world of publishing.

Daily Writing Check-in: June 14, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour working on the “final” revision of “Pithea.”

I worked on the one larger change, which was also basically the last one on the list. That took up most of the time, and now I am giving the story one more read-through to make sure I didn’t miss anything related to the things I changed. I am on page 16 of 468. I’m guessing this will take several days, unless I find a lot of time to spend on it in the next few days.

After this, I will begin to look into publishing options. I have a starting point in mind already.

Daily Writing Check-in: June 13, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 30 minutes working on pre-writing for Book 3 of “Pursuit of Power” trilogy, as well as beginning the “final” revision of “Pithea.”

I finished the character interview that helped me basically hash out more than half of the main plot of this book. And I can’t believe it, but I think I do have enough further ideas for this storyline for a 4th book in this arc.

This has led me to think that I don’t necessarily want to think of this arc as a trilogy (or tetralogy, as the case may be) within the greater series. Instead, maybe they should just be part of the series that happen to coincide more directly with each other than some of the other books.

I then went on to finish the early outline for this book (which still has no name, but I haven’t really put much thought into it yet either), and wrote down the ideas I have for the follow-up book so I don’t forget later. That ended goal #1 in my current list (which only contains 2 goals).

1. Plan Book 3 of “Pursuit of Power” trilogy

2. Final revision of “Pithea” – All of my writing goals this year have been for one final goal: to know what, if any changes, future book drafts may force in “Pithea,” so I can get those things changed now, before attempting to publish this book again. I want to make sure it’s exactly what it needs to be, as book 1 in this series of books. I do have a list of things that I want to change, and one of them will possibly change the structure in such a way to make it more marketable.

Though I now have ideas for another book at the end of the current list of Pithea books (+1, because the book I just finished outlining isn’t even on that list yet), it’s just going to have to fit into what already exists in “Pithea,” because I can’t put off revising and going forward with trying to publish it. Any longer, and it’ll just feel like stalling. So today I started on what will hopefully be a final revision to “Pithea”, at least regarding changes prompted by me, rather than by someone else like an editor, and look into publishing options.

Daily Writing Check-in: May 31, 2019

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Words/Time:  39 minutes working on goal #1 in my new short-list of writing goals.

1. Plan Book 3 of “Pursuit of Power” trilogy – Though I have always thought of this conclusion book as being something I’d hold off on working on until much later, the ideas for what should be in this book have just been flowing in the last several weeks. So I’m going to start with some broad planning, and either come up with an outline, or at least a solid list of plot points for now

2. Final revision of “Pithea” – All of my writing goals this year have been for one final goal: to know what, if any changes, future book drafts may force in “Pithea,” so I can get those things changed now, before attempting to publish this book again. I want to make sure it’s exactly what it needs to be, as book 1 in this series of books. I do have a list of things that I want to change–nothing huge–and goal #1 in this list could prompt more. So after that book has a semi-solid plan, I will do what will hopefully be a final revision to “Pithea”, at least regarding changes prompted by me, rather than by someone else like an editor, and look into publishing options.

I started on #1 today, which first entailed writing out broad strokes of ideas I have for this book. Then I decided that it was time for the mother of all character interviews. I’m bringing in all of the characters that will have the largest roles in this book to discuss where they left off in the previous book (“Protector”) and then where they’ll go from there.

goal tracker 19-5-31

After a very light March and barely managing to win Camp NaNoWriMo in April with a goal of 30 minutes average per day, surpassing my goal of an average of 1 hour writing work per day in May was really nice. Here’s to an equally productive June!

Daily Writing Check-in: May 30, 2019

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Words/Time:  2 hours, 6 minutes finishing the outline of “Protector.”

As it turns out, there is a place for the formal outline style in my life. Though it didn’t work out for me in the past when outlining a story, it worked quite well for this one. Though I have outlined the story in Scrivener as well, that’s mostly because I already have a draft written, and will keep maybe 2/3 of it, so the already-written text can be sorted by scene there. But over the last couple of days, I started making a formal outline of this story as I tried to understand how the scenes would flow best, and it worked wonders.

I spent a lot of time getting this just right today, and marking the places that will need a new scene, or will need a lot added to an existing scene. There are still many other scenes that will need some revision (well, probably all of them to some degree), but that’s a job for another day.

For now, I have finished #5 on my list of writing goals that I put forth on Feb. 4th!

1. Outline “Outcast” – Time spent: 12 days (total of 8 hours, 32 minutes worked)

2. Outline “Unexpectedly” – Time spent: 7 days (total of 7 hours, 36 minutes worked)

3. Re-outline “The Seeger Book” – Time spent: 26 days (total of 20 hours, 39 minutes worked)

4. Re-outline “Vin” – Time spent: 16 days (total of 18 hours, 3 minutes worked)

5. Re-outline “Protector” – Time spent: 14 days (total of 13 hours, 56 minutes worked)

I already know what my next 2 goals will be, and I’ll re-evaluate after that. I’ll post those tomorrow though.

(I went through and added approximately how many actual hours I put into each goal, because I knew that some days I worked longer than others, and was curious about how much time was actually spent on each task. Most interesting to me is that the work on “The Seeger Book” was only about 2 1/2 hours longer than the work on “Vin,” but it took 10 more days.)

Daily Writing Check-in: May 29, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 27 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “Protector.”

After posting about how uncertain I was about the way this work was going yesterday, I thought about what I said near the end of the post. I then came to the decision that I did have the wrong plot as the main plot. So I’ve changed some things up in my mind, and while the climax for the book that I have so far is not for the main plot, I think I can add another climax that will be for the main plot. And I even think I can downplay the climax I have so that it doesn’t overshadow the climax for the main plot that I will still need to write. I think.

Today’s time was spent continuing to sort through the scenes, adding in new ones that will need written, and moving some around so that they flow better. I’m still doing a lot of staring and thinking, but I feel like I’m understanding better as I go now. I’m really looking forward to the revision of this book, but I know it will be far down on a list of goals after I finish the current list.

I also started to put events into my timeline for all of the Pithea books, because I realized that some things were really skewed. I am considering cutting out about 2 years of time in this book.

Daily Writing Check-in: May 28, 2019

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Words/Time:  59 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “Protector.”

I anticipated it being difficult to try to sort through the scenes in the first draft and decide what was extemporaneous to what the story became and needed to be cut. But I had no idea how difficult it would be. I did a lot of staring and thinking today, and trying to come up with how to even sort through the scenes and figure out how to make the story flow without some scenes that I think might need cut. I fear I’m losing too much, but that if I keep some of this just to make it flow better, it will make the real purpose of the story drag.

So I guess I need to decide how important it is for the plot thread that continues from “Pursuit of Power” into this book to be the main plot. But if it’s not, then the climax is not actually related to the main plot…which I’m sure is a literary no-no.

Today’s post is probably more rambly and confusing than normal. That’s because I’m so confused.

Daily Writing Check-in: May 27, 2019

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Words/Time:  1 hour, 30 minutes doing preliminary work for the new outline of “Protector.”

I finished reading the first draft, making a few small changes along the way. Then I had to analyze the best way to proceed with sorting out which scenes can be kept and which are not related to the main plot, or an important-enough sub-plot and have to be cut. The way this story is laid out makes it difficult to wrap my head around some of this, so I decided the next step is to actually put the scenes into chronological order. That will help me a lot later anyway, because I’ll need to put this story into my timeline of all of the Pithea books at some point anyway (probably before I’m done re-outlining it).

The scenes are now in chronological order, so tomorrow I’ll start color-coding them by plot/sub-plot.