Day 1 of 10 Writing FayTown Calling
The first day and, as expected, I’m a little bit behind, a little bit ahead. Something I forgot to do in my post yesterday was discuss what all I’m looking at, or even how far along the story is. Dean Wesley Smith has been doing a daily writing log for the past six months or so, that’s what gave me the idea for this in the first place, but he mainly focuses on word count. He’s a big believer in the one draft, beginning to end style of writing. There is A LOT to take away from that, I should have finished this six months (if not a year) ago. I’m still developing as an author though (I think having a full time day job, child, and wife in nursing school has also played its part) and there have been many story and plot elements I just didn’t know what to do with, but I’m getting better.
The last one took five years, this one only a year and a half. So, progress. 🙂
Anyway, my accounting is going to be a bit different. For one, word count is not the end all be all of this log. I had over a hundred thousand words before I set myself to finishing it. Most of the material is there, it was just about making a story out of it and fixing the ridiculous issues toward the end and in certain places. Conceptually, most everything is plotted out, but my logistics are wonky, my foreshadowing off, and worst of all, the tone is inconsistent.
So, how I’m tracking this is by sections. There are something like twenty that need to be completed, but honestly I count it differently each time. Some of my folders are scenes, others chapters, the rest just notes with bullet points outlining direction and ideas.
All things that need to be taken care of, few of which are suitable to be recorded through word count.
Okay, so, this afternoon I spent four hours working on three of my sections. Good stuff, all of it, and I’m very happy with the results. I added almost two thousand words, but I believe I scraped away a good bit of chaff as well, words that just didn’t work, so it could be more. Some things need to be quick, others elaborate, some simple, others complex. I don’t always know which are which when I first write something out, again, something I’m developing.
After that, I took a break to make dinner, get my son up from his nap and just play daddy and husband. Good news, my vegetable soup recipe went a lot better than last time! Didn’t pick up my computer again until my wife was studying before going to bed. I was able to finish out the chapter I’d been working on and could see the troubled ones coming up.
And that’s where my day of writing jumped the rails. There are three or four sections of my daily goal left that I want to expand (one is a few paragraphs), I just don’t know how. I enjoy the scenery, there’s a lot that can be said about the world here, and I think there’s opportunity for character development…but for some reason it just fizzles. It’s not that I don’t think it works, just that not all of it works. So for the evening, instead of writing, I storyboarded, walking myself through the options I could take. I started around 12:30 and worked until 2:00, at which point I was too exhausted to do anything else.
I’ve worked out most of the problems with this scenes, I think, but I’m going to be working this morning on it to see what happens. Sometimes I need to think, sometimes I need to write. I’d be willing to bet money this is one I will have to iron out as best I can, then go back after I’ve reached the end of the story to see what I can do with it. There were whole chapters like that with Sorcerer Rising (including two toward the end that I wrote the weekend before the book came out, really proud of those actually, ask me about it sometime).
Will update once I have more.
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