Miracles Archives - Page 3 of 3 - All the Billion Other Moments

Sunday Morning Progress

Made some good progress this AM on the manuscript slog. I polished off two chapters before everyone got up (and managed to take a walk in between). My first draft was all from a single characters POV. This was great during NaNo to keep going, but I never intended to keep it that way. Chapter two was the first to change POV, and it went pretty well, but I think it might be a bit short. We’ll see once I get to the type in. Two characters with one line each at either end of the book merged into an all new, and much more fun character with a bit more to do, which was nice. I hope to squeeze some more time in somewhere today, but I’m happy with what I got done if I don’t.

Not Quite According to Plan

I got an early start yesterday hoping to make some good progress on my revisions. Then the kids decided to get up at 6:30. They were a bit of a handful most of the day (the family cold is not bringing out the best in people). Later when I tried again I only managed to squeeze in just under an hour before I was needed. Then I noticed the water dripping into our bedroom. So up to attic I go to find that the central air, which should drain outside, well, isn’t. Joy!

Oh, and I found at least six bee, hornet, or wasp nests on the house, and I only had three mostly empty cans of bee/hornet/wasp spray. Just enough to wake them up when I tried to get them last night.

Today we have a pretty busy day, and on top of it I need to get everything out of the way of the attic entrance. Not sure where I’m going to move stuff too… I’m going to try and get a bit more work on the revision done now, but I don’t have high hopes at this point.

“Miracles” Line for Scene finished

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. Life has been busy, and every spare moment I’ve had has been spend working on the line-for-scene cards for the Miracles revision. The line-for-scene technique is covered in Holly Lisle’s Create A Plot Clinic, it’s also covered briefly on Holly’s writing diary. I finished up this morning with 109 cards (16 green, 36 yellow, 31 orange, and 26 red).

I intend to start the read-through/write-in Friday. I still have a few post-its to stick onto the appropriate cards, and a few notes on some background things that need some shaping up. My goal was to have the type-in finished by July. I’m still hoping, but I’m not sure how exactly I would pull that off.

Back?

Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long. I’ve been busy, sick, or both. The past two weeks have been completely full up. On a good day I had an hour and a half of down time before bed. 2007 is turning out to be a rough year for me so far. Let’s hope it turns around soon. If all goes to plan (and it never does) I hope to get back to my pre-revision work on Miracles on Monday (earlier if possible). I’m not ready to set a firm deadline, but I want to be done revisions by the end of May.

Prepping for Revision

Parallel Shift changed into something I’m not quite ready to deal with, so I’ve started doing some background expansion for Miracles. I’m currently creating the language for race of creatures that live under the mountains using Holly Lisle’s Create A Language Clinic. It’s going well and I’m surprised by how much fun it is. The language itself won’t feature too heavily in the final product, but the way in which they speak factors in.

Current plan is to do the human language next, to help with using more reasonable names, and then I’ll move on to Holly Lisle’s Create A Culture Clinic. There’s going to be quite a bit of expansion going into the revision, so I want to solidify the background stuff as much as possible at this point.

Back to Writing (Now Where’s my Pencil?)

Things have (mostly) settled down around here. I’m ready to jump back into writing (hopefully) starting tomorrow, but I’m a bit stuck for what to do now. The original plan called for doing some work on another project before diving into revisions on Miracles. I had a list of things to do before the revisions, but it sort of called for me to be done with them by now. None of that happened so I can either start that list now, or skip it and start revisions. I need to make some sort of plan or I’ll use my writing time failing to decide where to start.

“Miracles” First Draft Completed

I finished my first draft this morning. I’d been having a hard time writing the past few days and I wasn’t quite sure why. This morning I was able to turn my inner editor back off and just write, and to my surprise I had reached “The End”. My goal was to make sure I finished this draft by the end of the year, so I’m rather glad that I’ve gotten it out of the way now so I can enjoy the holidays more.

I don’t think I’m going to revise this draft using One Pass, but instead I’ll write an expanded second draft after this one has cooled for a bit. When I started I had some ideas for what to do with a short work, but since I wrote this book with very little description I want to add the missing detail in and see where that puts me. I also want to take some of the new ideas about the world and work them back into my other worldbuilding note before starting the next draft, so things seem a bit less nebulous.

NaNoWriMo 2006: I did it!

Yesterday I was ready to stop writing for the day, so I calculated my word count and was a surprised to see I was within 300 words of the 50,000 word finish line. I decided to keep going and ten minutes later I checked again and I’d crossed the line (not by much, but that’s not the point).

So 50,000 words in 26 days. That beats anything I’ve ever done before. Is it any good? I think it is. Maybe not right now, but with a bit more work. Of course the novel isn’t finished. I’m guessing it’ll be about 60,000 by the end of this draft. It’s a very rough draft, but it’s nearly finished. My last novel had over 100,000 words in the first draft, but it took me about a year to write. At my current pace I’d have that done in two months.

So what have I learned? Continue reading “NaNoWriMo 2006: I did it!”

NaNoWriMo 2006

Sorry about the lack of updates. If you’ve been wondering where I am, you haven’t been paying attention. I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo, meaning I have until the end of the month to complete 50,000 words of a novel. I doubt I’ll be updating much during that time because if I have time to post then I should be working on the novel. Things should return to normal once I’m finished.