Sep

4

The New Year

Filed Under Art of Writing, Novel In Progress | Leave a Comment

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.

Popularity: 16% [?]