Did the list for chapters 6-10. There are some things to work on but that’s the next step, right now I’m still just taking stock of what still needs to be done. For the most part, the story seems really solid. I mean I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it feels far more together than I was expecting. Really, only the final two chapters are a ‘mess’, and I expect to have a little trouble when I get there. I think this story has just come together really well and that makes me happy. I’m feeling good about getting this Rough Draft done so I can get it out to beta readers and see what an actual audience thinks.
Tag: drafting
Draft 0
I finished Draft 0 of Blessings of the Neriel yesterday. (For clarification, I define a Draft 0 as a draft that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Those are the only requirements.) I was having so much trouble making myself sit down and write, and when I did sit down I just didn’t know what to do.
I sat down and wrote out everything else that needed to happen for the book to be done, and it was like, not very much. So I opened a new document in Scrivener and wrote the following:
“I am so resistant to/terrified of finishing this story. That’s okay, be terrified and write anyway. Make this the absolute worst trash you’ve ever written, use psuedo code, use clichés, break the fourth wall. Do your worst and get it done.”
And that’s what I did. I wrote each scene I had in my list. When I had accomplished the thing I was supposed to and stalled in getting from place to place, or from scene to scene, I just put a line break in and started writing the next thing. I called out issues I’d have to fix later and ignored them. I ignored scene plot holes (A lot of stuff happens at the Kismet Building, let me tell you.) and just wrote. And I got to the end. Is it good? No? It it readable? I mean technically since I used English words, but in terms of story, no. But is it done? Yes.
Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2022
Here I am, five days away from NaNoWriMo, and for the first time, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Usually by this point I know definitively whether I will or will not be participating and what I will be doing as my project and what my goal(s) is/are. Those sometimes differ from the “rules” of Nano, but I make it work for me, and I stick to the rules I set up for myself.
This year I am at the end of Draft 0. So close that using Nano to finish it would be a waste, but far enough that I’m not convinced I’ll be ready to move onto another project. Add to that the wrinkle that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are coming out on November 18th, and let’s be honest, if I get any real work done in the month after that game comes out I will be very surprised.
The plan right now is, Nano or not, to get Draft 0 of this book finished and then turn it into a First Draft which can be beta read. The current word count is 97k. That does include some notes and such.
And I just went and made an outline (omg discovery writer writing an outline!!!) of what needs to happen from where I am to the end and I think it actually makes sense. I was rather surprised at how well it all came out. It took me forever to get a handle on this story and the characters, and I think I managed it. So now I just have to write the scenes I don’t have yet. It’s close enough to the end that I don’t think there will be many surprises, at least not big ones. (Please, please no huge surprises that require a reworking of the entire book.)
Now the question is, “Do I think I can get this written in a week?”
I think it’s possible assuming none of these scenes just wipe me out emotionally. I had a scene with Jen that I just finished that did that. Hard to write but totally necessary. There might be a few, but with a week to do it …of course I have lost all sense of chapter breaks after Chapter 12. Truthfully, the chapter breaks in this book suck in the first place, but I digress. This made it hard to plan out the rest of my schedule based on chapters. So I had to do it scene by scene, and let me tell you, judging how long it will take to write a scene from just a few sentences of ‘this is what’s going to happen in this scene’ is not a skill I have yet. If I push hard, I can get Draft 0 done by November.
Then I suppose the idea for the first half of November, not necessarily Nano, would be to read through and write down allll the plot holes, and try and get those finished before Pokemon comes out. Would be nice to be able to throw out the story to my beta readers when it’s time to play Pokemon. Let’s see.
[SGC Week 4.5] Finding Eira
This week got away from me a little bit. I had some doctor things going on, all good, but necessary and requiring time and attention. The SGC call on Monday was talking about agents and querying and so while there were no cool breakthroughs with my story, I started getting back into the idea of being able to query again. Obviously I still need to finish this book, which likely won’t happen by the end of the course as I’d planned because I had such a huge shift in Eira that I needed to start over. But that is my process. Trying to force myself to keep going when I don’t have what I’ve already written to a certain point doesn’t work, and I’ve proved that to myself enough times through failure that I’m starting to accept it.
That being said, I am much happier with the beginning of the story now. Eira and I are still working through some things where I think I want her to care about people more than she actually does, but there isn’t no care there, which is what I was always the most scared of. And I got really good feedback this Thursday from my group when I gave them the first chapter and a half (rewritten, though they’d never read the old version). I mean there was the fact that what I’d given them before was very ‘rough draft’ and this was far more polished, but I was surprised by how well they responded to it.
I had my first moment of real ‘impostor syndrome’ where they were praising things I’d done and I’m just going ‘I have no idea how this story plays out’ and ‘I don’t know how to carry that theme through the whole book’, but the encouragement was nice and, well, encouraging. And I do still feel like I’m making progress, and that’s the whole point. Right now I’m just going to keep going and when the SGC is over in two weeks, I’m going to reassess where I am and how quickly I think I can finish this book. I got very close to the end before I restarted this time, so I think finishing draft 0 isn’t too far off. Then it’s just a matter of finding out how many huge plot holes I have to fill.
Goal for this week is to keep rewriting a scene or two a day. Some are easier than others, it’s really not an exact science, so it’s more that I work for at least a half hour each day. Usually I go a bit over. Also, read my group’s submissions. Since it’s so late in the week that’s all I have. Hopefully I’ll get my next post up closer to the day I had planned.
[SGC Week 3] The Epiphany
I have been trying, when doing these blog posts, to write about what has happened with my writing/life in the past week, which means before Monday. But I was sick this week, the blog post got delayed, and on Monday I had an epiphany. Prior to Monday I am working my way into the ending climax part of the story, and some pieces of that are coming together, but Eira was still…not right.
So I have been writing Blessings of the Neriel for a while now and I have never really gotten Eira, the main character,’s personality down. I’m still writing the book because that’s how I work. I write until I find out what I’m supposed to learn about the story and then I go back and fix it. It was taking a long time with Eira, or really, not so much. See, I had a period where I thought Eira might need to be a narcissist or a sociopath, but on researching it, one of the main traits is a lack of empathy. They literally cannot care about someone emotionally. And so much of the heart of what I write is about emotions and how people connect with each other this was just not an option. I couldn’t have a main character who cannot feel emotions, so I pushed it away.
But the writing exercise we did on Monday’s SGC writing class was ‘What does your character want’, and then exploring that like what’s in their way and what are the risks/consequences of going for it and for failing to get it. So I started writing and it was pretty easy to see that when I was forced to think about her motivation in those terms, that the only thing she cared about was getting back to her former glory by any means necessary. So she’s doing all this stuff that seems ‘good’, but for entirely selfish reasons. She just wants to be awesome again.
And that upset me, cause I’m back in the ‘well she doesn’t care about anyone’ space. I cried as I explained it to the group. I was encouraged to read some books with antihero protagonists, and to look a bit more into narcissism. I will tell you, one of the problems with looking narcissism on the Internet is that most of it is for people who know/love/interact with a narcissist, and how to keep from being taken advantage of or losing yourself in their narcissism. This is important, to be sure, but most of the first results do not talk about what it’s like to be a narcissist from their point of view. I suppose because a narcissist wouldn’t care to look up ‘am I a narcissist and what do I do about it’?
But I did find one thing that gave me hope, a quote from this article.
Both past and current life circumstances can evoke multiple features, but may not necessarily be an ingrained part of who someone is (their personality).
A broad, general example of this would be someone who experiences a season of financial hardship after years of financial wealth. They may be preoccupied with fantasies of the wealth and power they used to have. They may also feel superior to others, become envious of those who are wealthy, and tend to gravitate toward people who make them feel important. This individual may present with features of NPD, but these features are connected to their circumstances and not necessarily their personality.
In other words, just because a person may possess features of NPD, does not mean they don’t have the ability to love. However, it is quite possible that their capacity to love may be limited.
Which basically describes Eira’s situation. She was top of the world, loved, praised, talented and then it was all taken away from her. So she could present with bits of NPD without the undesirable (to me the author) complete lack of empathy. Obviously I’ll need to do more research, not that I think if I portray narcissists incorrectly they’ll be all that upset about it, but still, it’s the right thing to do. And hopefully after this, the story will start to come together a bit better, including the opening scene that I knew was not the correct opening scene.
Goal for this week: Keep up 1k words a day. (I have been and it’s been so awesome.), read my group’s submissions. Get my next submission ready.
[SGC Week 2] Settling In
It’s a blah kinda day, but really not all that bad. Been playing Triangle Strategy and Stardew Valley. Been keeping up on my words. Been keeping the pets fed. Been going to work. Been hanging with the husband. Been keeping the house somewhat in order. It’s a rather full and varied life, but that works for me.
I think one of the more interesting things I’ve realized is that writing 1k words a day isn’t really that much of a drain. Like, I’m getting it done but I don’t ever feel like I have to spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer doing it, and I’m still able to get other things done. Part of my brain wants to tell me ‘well then obviously you could be writing more’, but truthfully, the fact that I’ve been pretty consistent about getting this done for the past two weeks is awesome. I don’t want to try and do more and then burn myself out, especially since, like I’ve said before, this is the rough part of the book. If I can just make consistent progress for the next month I will be super happy.
The SGC writing class last week was on narrative distance, where were saw where we normally wrote, then tried the opposite. I write close most of the time, and writing far was really weird. I could see a point for it, but I don’t really like it. :p And the Write Ones group critiques were the other two people in the group. Both stories were enjoyable. Though we had one of the critiquees come out of the loving bubble of silence and then start explaining everything we had said we didn’t understand about the story. After about five minutes I took off my headphones because they just kept going and I didn’t want to hear it. The point is that you should find out about it from the story, some things should be questions, but I totally understand that desire to explain everything. I used to do it as well, so I don’t blame them. But I just didn’t want that information so I can continue to not know when I read more of the story.
This morning I still hadn’t put in my next pages for critique. I was feeling way too self-conscious about the roughness of my rough draft. But the group leader convinced me to submit anyway, and so I hope it goes well. The next critique day is on my Birthday so that will be exciting. I will have cake!
Goals: 1k words a day, keeping it up. Be accepting of the critique that will come in on basically the roughest thing I’ve ever let another person read. I know my group wants to help, so there’s no real danger, I just have to convince my lizard brain of that.
Slow and Steady
It’s the final push to getting the Wizard ready for an alpha read. My goal had been to have a completed draft 0, but I didn’t quite manage that, so I’m making what I have as readable as possible so I can get it to my alpha readers to encourage some discussion.
My husband has also been running a D&D campaign set in the Storyteller universe, which is letting us explore some of the aspects of the world that I purposely tried to avoid in the books. There will be a post with more detail on that at a later date. I have to still figure out how many spoilers would be involved in putting that all out there.
Other than that, it’s just been slow and steady work. These posts tend to either be talking about my depression challenges or my just plugging away at my writing. Would be nice if there was more excitement to it, but I’ll take the slow and steady work over the depression any day.
Writing My Way Through
So I’m a little late on this journal entry, as, well I just haven’t gotten back into the habit of biweekly updates yet. So here’s my update:
Doing well on getting my daily word count of at least 1k words. There’s also been some revision in there so I don’t have the straight up word count that would suggest, but I’m happy with my progress. I wrote a whole bunch of scenes that really pushed things forward, and plenty of scenes where I just stared at the screen for a while because nothing was happening.
I have, since this week, gone back to the beginning to smooth out the story a bit because I’m unclear about a few things. My story is coming out even more fractured than it was for LotDK, and so I’m having a harder time holding it together in my head. Smoothing is the only option for that, even if I lose the straight up word count I would otherwise get. I’m also supposed to have my rough draft done by the end of this week before spending two weeks smoothing. That is a long shot unless some idea just completely overwhelms me. I don’t have an ending yet. I tried writing a bit of it but I’m just not far enough in the story yet.
I suppose in the future during the planning phase, I should interlace word output with smoothing, because that’s really what ends up happening anyway. So the plan is to finish smoothing, pour out some more words, rise and repeat until my March Alpha Read. I’ll certainly have something to show them, even if I don’t exactly have an ending yet. And technically I can still write the ending while they’re reading the first bit. 😀
Writing the Storyteller
So last week I finished up my read through and wrote out my list of everything major point that still needed to be written in both the Huntsman and the Wizard. Creating the list ended up only taking two days instead of the week I had allotted to it, so I started writing out some scenes that needed to be changed. I’m giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day. Most days so far I’ve ended up writing more than that anyway, but I don’t want the number of words to discourage me too much. I’d rather get consistent words.
Probably get a chapter done a day for about a week and then I’ll just try and write as many of these scenes as possible. When I write new scenes like this I generally end up with something good eventually. Maybe not every scene, but as a discovery writer, discovery writing is where I really shine.
Nanowrimo style for a month now, so I’m excited about what’s going to come out even though I have no idea, but after this I SHOULD have an idea of what the ending will be. This is about when I need to know where I’m going. Then I sort of work in from both sides until I figure out the middle …like a sandwich? Something like that.
The Year 2020
The first journal entry of the new year! Things were crazy at the end of the last year. Crazy! And now I want to get back to a normal. Not the same normal as before, since that’s impossible with my new houseplants and YouTube channel, but a new normal that I can be happy with.
So basically I “forgot” about writing for about three months and even now I’m having a little trouble getting back into it. I can give you all the reasons why I think this is, but after I wrote that long tyraid, I did what I normally do in a situation like this. I created a list!
This list is all the things I need to do to basically finish the Storyteller trilogy.
*Smooth what I have written
*Write the rest of the Wizard, draft 0
*Alpha read
*Fix major plot point through two books
*Fix minor points through two books
*Beta read
*Fix any problems
*Two-three final passes
Man, it looks so easy when it’s just a list like that. But once I had that list, I went through and guesstimated how long each step would take.
So I currently have seven more chapters to smooth. I’m going to give myself one week for that. I think that’s pushing it a bit, but it might just force me to get it done and over with. It’s not important that it’s perfect yet. *Jan 13-19*
Then I need to write the rest of the wizard. So I think what I need to do is once I’ve smoothed it, I’ll do another one of those “outlines” where I go through and outline what I have, then get ideas of where I wanted to go and scenes I still need to write. And write a list of all the things I want to have happen. Including the ending. *Jan 20-26*
Then I need to write them. I’d like to give myself a month, do a Nanowrimo type deal. *Jan 27-Feb 23*
Then I’ll need to smooth, maybe two weeks. *Feb 24-Mar 8*
Then I send out the Wizard for alpha reading. Hopefully they can get it done in a month. *Mar 9 – Apr 5*
When I get it back, go through the list, then go through myself and write down everything! *Apr 6 30- Apr 19*
-scenes that still need to be written/finished
-plot holes
-details to be done
-medium things
-minor things
-naming crap
Then I need to fix these problems. This is going to be the hardest to figure out the time-line of. For right now I’m giving myself a month. This will likely change. I’ll reevaluate the time-line when I get to the step above. *Apr 20- May 17*
Beta read: See, again, if it can be done in a month. *May 18- Jun 14*
Fix any problems, make a final list: one week *Jun15- 21*
Two-three final passes: ~month min *Jun22- July19*
Whenever I do one of these schedules, I’m reminded about *why* it takes so long to write a book. There’s just so many steps and there’s only so fast you can go over this many words. Still, I now have my goal set up in front of me. When I finish it this time, I can finally play Kingdom Hearts 3. :p
