Words About Writing

I find it's important for me to track what I'm doing. While editing I don't count words. I don't count hours. I ensure that I get through a scene a day, sometimes two. ...If I'm honest, this month there have been days when I've gotten stuck in a scene and flip into writing mode instead, finishing the scene the next day. Overall I'm being more diligent with what matters, though.  Every day I: edit, write, study. I also read daily, but I'm not tracking that this month. Too much writing and editing, and I'm trying to build the habit of daily study. It's hard when I'm not going for a degree or anything. Next month I will add a goal to be more diligent on this blog. Weekly, most likely. For now, I'm going through the process. All the nitty-gritty that needs to be done in order to prep for publishing. I just hope I'm doing it right.

This month is the Blogging A to Z Challenge, and I am participating through another blog. Someday I'll do it here, but this is not that year. In addition to writing a new post every day, I am going forward with editing my earlier WIP.  The editing is going well. I'm much more diligent with that than with blogging. Can you imagine? I really feel that I'll get this WIP into a publisher's hands by the end of the year. So I'm editing. I'm a day behind in blogging, but then I'm two months behind in blogging here, so a day isn't much! That is the purpose for my absence. Editing is good. Writing is small. That's all. I'll be back next month probably, after the chaos subsides.

 Actually, I finished on the 31st of January. YAY!  I'm actually pleased with the ending I created. I know there are mountains of work to do on this novel, and editing will be at least a year of work, but for now I'm setting my draft aside and working on a shorter piece that might be quickly published. So my new process will be editing, and seeking a venue for publication, and submission. Hopefully all that can be accomplished this spring. With absolutely no knowledge on how short stories go, I'm guessing a couple months? Maybe three?  I'd love to be editing one of my other - non-gigantic - novels during the summer.  A toast to new beginnings!

I'm reading a book of the genre I believe I will ultimately be published in, and not loving it. There are few protagonists in this genre that I have found I identify with. I guess that's why I write. But it occurred to me after watching something on TV that maybe my personal bias is getting in my way. I tried envisioning the protagonist as a different race, or from a different upbringing, with different social mores bred into her from the get-go, that kind of thing. And it's better. She still drives me crazy with her bad decisions, and piling one bad thing on top of the other, but I get that it may be relatable to people. It made me realize I might be pinning my "mature adult" perspective on my own 20-something protagonist. I'll tackle that in the editing. (I'm surely close to done by now!) That's in my reading. In my writing, just today I added a tiny incident with a minor character - who wasn't even a character before, just a known entity. I was ...

Stab me with a fork, this is interminable! First, TWO MONTHS since my last post? How did that happen? Second, I'm back in the old WIP I was trying to finish before Nanowrimo. 😥 Yes, I won Nanowrimo. The story, as I felt, will never see the light of day. There's some story, some musing, some theory, some personal exposition... Maybe I could salvage a short story out of it or something.  That's a possibility. Hmm... So, I'm back to the WIP I did NOT finish before November. Now, though, I'm pushing myself to write every day. Maybe not as much as I did during Nanowrimo, but at least daily, something.  I'm getting closer. New issues cropped up that I realized needed to be resolved before arriving at the conclusion, so that's where I am now. But I'm closer. I can feel it. This month, maybe early February.

I took a break from the random writing down of thoughts pertaining to my story subject, and decided to work on a character. I'd had an idea for one character, and started writing her early,  But suddenly, between feeling like I was drifting about without a story and trying to wrap up my other WIP, I wanted to try some different personas on my one character. So for three days I wrote her - sometimes him - with a different primary attitude or dominant personality trait.  Instead of the initially sympathetic character, I wrote an angry, vindictive version (why angry? Let's dig deeper!), a slinky, seductive version, and a kind of accidental "oops! That's my job, right?" kind of character. Couldn't get behind that one. Couldn't really figure out the world that last version must live in. Anyway, I delved a little deeper into the angrier version and suddenly felt it worked better as an interview, so voila! A new, secondary character.  This week I came back to tha...

 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 ...