All the Billion Other Moments

Made some progress this morning. It’s hard to get back into it again after almost a week off. I need to try and make some time every day, even if it’s just for one scene. The current section is moving pretty fast, but I have the feeling I need to reshuffle some scenes here and there still.

Day 17 was actually Monday. I haven’t had a moment of free time between then and now and I don’t have any right now. Hopefully tomorrow.

I think I’m getting things down a bit better. I had very little time today, and made a bit of progress. Hope it keeps going.

Today didn’t go at all to plan. We had a pile of places to be today, but Rachel isn’t feeling herself, so we ended up staying home. On the plus side Denise was kind enough to give me time to work on the book (thank you!), so here I am posting an update. Some of the chapters look a bit shorter that I want them, but I’m going to finish the type in and think about what to do afterwards (if anything).

Things haven’t been going well lately. Not in any way. So far, today continues that trend.

I got up early to work on my type in. My current speed is about ten minutes per page to get it done. I’ve got over 500 pages left, so that’s well over 80 hours of work left if I don’t manage to speed up somehow. So I don’t need additional setbacks.

I mentioned before that I started doing revisions in WriteWay Pro. It’s pretty good in a lot of ways. After finishing two scenes this morning I thought I should do a global search and replace on a changed character name. Now I’m used to working in OpenOffice.org where this same type of activity on this same size document is fairly speedy. Also I have OpenOffice.org set up to auto-save a copy of the file every few minutes. I do this because when I get working I loose track of things like real life. I’m sure you can see where this is going. After watching the simple Search & Replace peg my CPU usage at 100% for about 20 minutes and error came up. When I clicked “OK” WriteWay Pro just went away. Not good.

I opened WriteWay back up, looked at where my edits left off and mourned the last hour of my life which was a complete and utter waste of time. Now I have to go to work, so here’s to yet another day with no writing progress.

Picked up a cheap document holder to see if it would help me keep my place when moving from page to screen. It does.

There’s a ton going on, and I don’t have the time to go into it now. The important thing is I started the Type-in finally. I’ve migrated from OpenOffice.org to WriteWay Pro. It has it’s good and bad, but I’m going to give it some more time before going into it.

Anyway, tracking progress should be interesting, since the total word count will fluctuate as I go. So here’s where I started:

And here’s where I finished for the day:

The beginning is mostly cuts and rewording to make things tighter. Hopefully I’ll get some momentum and be able to move faster.

The day after my last post I returned to the day job. My schedule is all over the place instead of the 7am to 3pm day I’d grown accustomed to. As a result I’ve made no attempt to start the write-in portion of my revisions yet.

I have been doing more reading, mostly in preparation for my next novel. I now think a lot of the hard revision work on the first book can be traced back to my outline, and I’m hoping that knowledge of past mistakes also makes thing easier.

I learned a lot from Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. Chapter 10 has a 7 question quiz to help you decide if you are an OP or a NOP. Funnily enough I came out right in the middle. That’s right, even with an odd number of questions I managed to end in a tie. The last question is:

You would be happier as a:
1. Software developer 2. Poet

I couldn’t decide. I enjoy both of those things, and for many of the same reasons. When I tried to break it down I hard a hard time seeing any real difference between the two.

I’m going to take that to mean I need an outline, but I also need the freedom to explore as I write. Now the tough part is finding a way to put that to use.

Wahoo! I’ll write more later, but I need to go spend time with the long ignored family now.

My most-of-the-day-writing days ended yesterday (and even then I didn’t get nearly the time in I wanted). I did get a few hours today though. This latter section is slow going. I’m pretty sure I wrote most of it late at night, and it shows. Still, progress is progress.