Words About Writing

Draft One of my latest novel is in the bag! I ended Nanowrimo with over 70,000 words! Not all of them will stay, obviously, and I had some issues in the middle with bits that I was working on disappearing, but I'm proud of myself. Today, I went into Scrivener's outline format and checked out the scenes I'd written. I updated summaries for some of them. (Pre-Nano I'd written summary cards for the scenes I wanted to write, but sometimes they ran away from the plan.) I will add this step to all of my first drafts. It will be very helpful later in finding what needs fixing, I'm sure! So that's it for now. Well, that's it for this draft of this book. Now I need to decide what happens next. I need to get back into my last editing work. Hmm... How much time until I pick that up? One day? Three? A week? Or do I fill in some of the blanks that are in this current one? Keep going every day? Next week? Not a week. I need to keep going. 

Still editing, but in a slightly different manner. The Nanowrimo Youtube channel has been doing a series on editing with a couple pros - of course they are showing off their software and program, but it seems a good way to do top-down editing (big issues down to little things). I've been trying to adapt their tips for my Scrivener version. And then April happened, and on my other blog I did the A to Z Challenge. Edited, too, but didn't have as much time to spend on editing. Plus, I have a new business venture waiting in the wings of my life, and that took a lot of time in the past few weeks. So again, less time for other things like editing. I hate putting off editing, but realistically, until I have an agent and a publisher urging me to meet deadlines, my deadlines and timing goals are my own to keep or change. If I am going to keep balance in my life, I have to be flexible in all areas of my day-to-day plans.  Back on track, though.  I think. I hope.

Fully in edit mode now. I finished a once-over, adding small notes. I did some reorganizing so that Scrivener will compile it better for me than the one I'm querying right now. Now I'm on the second read-through, reading back-to-front, scene by scene, to make sure each scene works in its own right. I'm making edits, but mostly adding notes. The next edit will be front-to-back, and then I'll see if I have duplicate notes in different places. Actually, I may need to go back to the end and do some of the "first" scenes again. As I was editing, I had pulled out a reference book on scene-work, and I think I might have missed some key things in the first scenes I looked at. I was originally trying to ensure that the ending worked as a complete ending, and didn't focus on scene-work in those final scenes. So there's a lot of work to do on this one, but I have come to believe that it's actually better than the one that's out there in query-world. Query...

Over a week later, and all the files are moved into their new home. I've matched up the comments as best I can, and I'm okay with that. A lot of the comments were notes to "delete this" or "use a better word" so they could be anything and I didn't stress too much about them. I'm still 6,000 words short, but they're there somewhere. Or, they would have been deleted anyway. A word count is a flexible thing. I'm not bothered too much. I want to play with the timeline a little and see if I can come up with a format I like. I got busy recreating the novel and forgot to pull out timing information. So I'll do a little playing with that part of it these next few days and then... FINALLY jumping into the book my reader had. It's been turned into a shared file, so I can start with the notes that are there and just keep going as they finish the task. I'm looking forward to that. It gives me motivation. 

I was doing great.  As planned when I last posted, I was working on a timeline for my magnum opus - going through scenes to find the timing of everything and dropping the information into a gantt chart, making minor changes to the text. That's been my last ... four days. Then yesterday I set up and turned on my computer, went about my normal "getting ready for the day" routine, casually passing my computer and opening scrivener, then the file, and saw it open to where I had left off the day before. Fine. No problem. I was doing something in a different part of the house (no one else was around) and when I came back, my computer was asleep (of course). No problem. Tap it to wake it up. Scrivener is still open, but the document I was in was blank! No words! I clicked on the document above it in the manuscript folder. Blank. The next one - blank. So I panicked and closed Scrivener. I opened it again and thought, "Maybe it's a visual thing." The project still sh...

I was going to come in and write "DONE!" because I finished adding in the extra text chats that tie the two subplots together, but then I saw that I've been overusing the word "done". I'm not truly done. I am, again, done with a step. It did not take long at all, after reviewing the manuscript and writing in what I wanted where... so easy to just drop that into the Scrivener version. According to my to-do list the next step is sending it out to beta-readers, but I was impressed by the weakness of my writing as I re-read it the last couple weeks, so I may be in for one more edit. I need to liven things up.  Some scenes are great as-is. I'm really proud of them. Other parts I know I'm just trying to fill in blanks. And do I really need all of it? Also, I noticed a lot of passive voice. I'm not sure what I'll do, so I'm taking a day or two to try and figure it out.

 A week into Nano and I'm almost on track. I'm still working on my other WIP, so my attention is divided and my time is divided, but I'm logging words every day, so that's good. I'm SO CLOSE to ending the other WIP. I can't wait for that moment, when I can finally sort out the mess of this year's Nano work. I'm putting words into Scrivener, but each chunk doesn't flow together and I'm still not sure what this book will be about. By that I mean style. The subject is chosen, but will it be fiction, memoir, a bit of both? Hard to say. Meanwhile I'm fighting a bug which means sleeping when possible, which means NOT writing as much as I need to.  My nanowrimo counter shows that I'm almost 5,000 words behind where I need to be to finish on time. That's the worst start I've ever had during any Nanowrimo ever. I'll make it up. I just need to get the characters home in my other WIP so that my brain can switch gears. How's it going ...

(The question mark in my title is for the word "nearing".) In my edit of this WIP, I am "nearing" the climax. Again, though, there are a lot of synopses where action should be, so it's more work than it appears. My scrivener folder shows only a few documents left, but they are the BIG part - where resolution happens or doesn't. In fact, I wrote three different possible endings! I know which ending I like best, though, so I'm looking forward to getting there. I just need to sort out the details of how, precisely, my protagonist reaches that point. All of this aside, my brain has been more in the book that I sent out to beta-readers last fall. I set it up for a major edit, then wrote this WIP instead. In the current state of the world, with people staying home and dealing in some way with a world-wide crisis, the epic quest I'm currently editing seems redundant. When every day is a minefield, who would want to read about a different kind of min...

I am loving this next editing step. (I was right: the 4th reader hadn't finished, but she gave me a couple general notes about the part she read.) First, in Scrivener, I pulled out all the scenes that had significant comments from my readers. That dropped my word count from 57,000+ to around 23,000. (I'm thinking of doing major re-writes during Nanowrimo, so need to reduce the word count.) Now, I'm going through the remaining scenes, cleaning up minor grammatical stuff, and using the "Notes" function to make suggestions to myself for later. My intention is to put notes into all of these remaining scenes. Since it's flowing pretty well, that should take about a week. After that, I'll do the same with the scenes I purged into a separate folder down in the "research" tab on Scrivener. But for those, I hope to clear out whole paragraphs of text as I go. I feel like I'm back on track. It took a while to compile the notes from my readers....

We all have distractions. The trick is finding a way to move forward around or through the distractions. Lately, life has taken a turn and dropped an extra plate in my lap. Not a problem in the long run, but the last week or two has been rather chaotic trying to keep all the plates spinning on the pole and ending up dropping one or two. The good news is, I actually made some good progress in my WIP, I think. At least it's getting organized so that I can , at some point, make "good progress". The slow news is in the editing work. I sorted out my editing work in Scrivener as I needed, but then stalled. I had made a list of things that need to be done to the manuscript, and struggled with the next step. So today, I'm moving beyond that. It's very freeing to release yourself from your own rules. Who says things need to be done in a certain order? So I sat down with the printed manuscript to start putting my hand-written changes into the document, prior to diss...

...Like Hamlet says, "whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..." Fortune here meaning that fickle demon that offers both good and bad. A new month, new determination. I finished the re-write over a week ago and as planned, I printed the new draft. Then I stalled out. I made a list of things I want to check for. A couple things are kind of big - like seeking places to expand one of the relationships between characters, or expanding the subplot. Otherwise, I want to read for excessive adverbs, unnecessary dialog tags, find my pet words that I use too much. You know, clean house a bit, verbiage-wise. I have read - and this being my first book, everything I'm doing is based on things I've read - that it's not a good use of time to edit for nit-picky details before you are totally satisfied with the story. Because what if you make big changes, and then you have to go back and pick for nits again? But I can't. I tried sitting down wi...

Somehow, for this book - which I imported into Scrivener into a basic novel format - Scrivener is not functioning as well as the one I wrote in the Nanowrimo novel configuration on Scrivener. My searches based on custom meta-data yielded no results ( this was a key way that I sorted my character arcs before leaving my Nano draft ) and the cork board... well... Not actually a Scrivener problem, but a learning curve for me. The cork board only works within each folder. So for future books, I will not divide into sections until after the entire draft is done.That way I can go to the cork board and move things around before sorting them into groups! If you don't use Scrivener, sorry for all the software details. I'm still getting used to it myself. Last week, I did make some major changes to two minor characters. Not exactly combining them into one, I gave one character's dominant characteristic to the other, who was better-suited to it, frankly, and modified the first to...