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Work In Progress
Oct
2
A cold, October day….
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If it’s not above seasonal average temperatures, it’s below them. Cold, windy, and otherwise yucky outside. I’m debating whether or not to turn the furnace back on, or deal with the chill by drinking hot tea.
Today’s been a reasonably good day. After spending four days on it, I finally finished the revisions to Chapter 6. I had four crits to work from, but they remarkably all said more or less the same thing, so that part was easy. What took me so long was the changes I had to make due to changes in the plot. When it was all said and done, the chapter was almost 1100 words shorter than the first draft. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds. About 730 of them were moved to Chapter 7, so only 364 words were removed forever.
I felt like I was on a bit of a roll, and started on Chapter 7. I’m feeling a bit better about it, but I’ve only just begun the revisions. I don’t have any crits to use for this chapter, so it’s going to all be on me for this. No guidance. We’ll have to see how things go.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Sep
25
Cleaning: A Writer’s Boon and Bane
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Has it really been over a week since I last posted here? I find that hard to believe. Dates on the blog entries don’t lie.
What have I been doing during this time? Writing and cleaning. Or, as I like to say, “editing my life”. 
As I’ve mentioned before, I work at home. For reasons I won’t get into, I’ve let the housework slide. Doing the bare minimum, letting things pile up until it hits a crisis point. It’s stressful on all of us, and it’s taking a toll on my writing. I’m just not happy and can’t concentrate well. When the world around me is cluttered, my mind is cluttered. To fix that, I’ve set up a new routine - I spend the morning cleaning a specific section, taking it 15 to 20 minutes at a time (with breaks so that I don’t burn myself out), and the afternoon is spent working on stuff like the novel.
The cleaning process got delayed by two days because the belt in the vacuum cleaner snapped, and the first place we tried to get the replacement didn’t carry them. So I went this morning and bought what I needed at Target. I didn’t get as much cleaning done as I wanted to, but another section of floor has been cleaned and vacuumed. Tomorrow’s job is to go through my cookbook/reference bookshelf. Figure out what I’ll leave on the shelf, what’ll go into storage, and what I’m going to get rid of. The stuff I’m keeping is going to get scanned into Readerware. I figure I might as well do that, so we can complete the inventory of our books and record which ones are on the shelf and which ones are in bins (and which bin).
Editing of the novel is going slowly. 200 words today (I lost half the day and half my evening to running errands and school related activities). I’m still moving forward, which is good. Not updating the WIP meter, though. I only do that when a chapter is completed.
Popularity: 28% [?]
Sep
11
Strange Dreams
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It’s been a couple of days since I wrote a blog entry. I’ve been busy doing a number of different things. Not sleeping well because stories are whirling around in my head is part of the problem, but last night was just so weird.
In my dream, Alton Brown was at our house. I don’t know why, other than it was a surprise and he ended up on our doorstep. For some reason, our bedroom was off the living room and Brown was going to be sleeping on the sofa bed. He asked if it would be okay to play music while he slept, and brought out this huge portable stereo.
When it was time to cook supper, he wouldn’t let me start cooking until he checked out each and every item in my kitchen. Not because he was being picky or obnoxious, because he wanted to know what was in my kitchen - what each thing was, what I used it for, and if it was a multi-tasker. And in the dream I was thrilled, and proudly showed it all to him, including things only my dream self knew what they were and what they were for. We never actually started cooking, and I woke up thinking “what the hell was that?”
I have no idea what prompted the dream. Does this mean I should stop checking out the Food Network website so much?
So, on the writing front….
Working on Chapter 5 of TMA today. I’m still having problems with the scene with Sgt. Tucker after the animal attack. I’m beginning to think that maybe I should just cut the scene altogether. It doesn’t really move the story forward at all. It shows another aspect of Alex’s personality, but that can be done in another scene. Plus, if I cut the scene, it’ll make it a lot easier to finish the chapter and get it posted. If I do cut it, I’ll write it up on a cue card and set it aside in my extra scene pile. You never know - I might just use a variation of it later.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Sep
5
Friday At Last
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I’m hoping it will be a good day today. Matt’s telecommuting so I’m not alone in the house. Not that it matters much, as he’s working in the computer room and only emerges for coffee and other necessities. Still, adult conversation during lunch is a welcome change.
I finished the revisions to Chapter 4 this morning and posted it up to my crit group. Chapter 5 is going to take longer to do, as it’s not finished. I hit a wall, of sorts, when I was first working on it. Alex’s police officer needs to talk to her about something, and I couldn’t write it. I don’t remember why I couldn’t write it at the time; probably was a mental block or something, so I pushed on. No skipping it this time. It has to get gone.
As you may have seen earlier, I did a post with a bit of game writing I did. I try not to do more than one post per day, but I also try to keep the fiction stuff separate. Doing that makes it easier to find, and my visitors here won’t have to read stuff they don’t want to.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Sep
4
The New Year
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No, I don’t mean the calendar year, but the school year. It’s so much easier to plan things around the kids when they’re young. Looking back at this blog, my last entry was April 3. Man, that just sucks.
What have I been doing all this time? A lot of different things, but I let doing entries here slide, and I wish I hadn’t. So, back to trying to do this daily.
If you take a look at the Work In Progress Meter, you’ll see that it now says “The Morgan Affair - Restart”, and the word count is at a measly 8k. That’s because I’m starting over at the beginning of the book again. It’s not a fresh start by any means. I’m editing what I already have written, adding in new stuff that arose from things I wrote in later chapters, and when I hit Chapter 12 or so, it’ll be mostly new words.
Why the start over? My writing group has decided to set minimum participation requirements: 3 chapters posted and 6 critiques submitted. The crits work out to one per each member of the group (not including yourself) plus an extra crit. We rotate who gets the extra crit so that everyone gets two each month. Of course, if we want to post or crit more, then that’s fine. After all, it’s a minimum requirement.
August was the first month with the new requirements, and we all managed to do it. It was difficult for some of us, but we met the challenge. I’m already ahead of the game for September. I’ve got all my crits done (or at least I think I do, but there’s time for me to get them done if I missed one), and I’ve posted one chapter. I’ve got one more set of notes to go through before I post my second chapter for the month.
My goal is to try and get at least one chapter posted a week. Most urban fantasy novels are around 100k words, and with an average of 2500 words per chapter, that’s 40 chapters, or 10 months. That seems like a long time to take to write that first draft. With NaNoWriMo, you write 50k words in a month. I remember the stress I was under to get those words done, and I don’t want to do that again. Nor do I want to overwhelm the others with lots of chapters. Two chapters a week might be possible, but I really don’t want to push my luck.
Now, I know you’re expecting a post from me about on how to organize your research. I haven’t forgotten about it. It’s sitting here as a draft, waiting for me to get back to it. I have what I’d like to think are some useful ideas, and even a download or two. There’s a decade’s worth of methods and practices I’m trying to organize and write down in a way people other than myself can understand.
In addition to all of this, I’m supposed to be getting the World of Lisacraft podcast back up and running. Let’s see how that goes.
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