Writing Archives - Page 5 of 15 - All the Billion Other Moments

“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 Lisleâ€™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.

Holly Lisle’s "Create A Plot Clinic" Available

Holly Lisle’s latest writing ebook, Create A Plot Clinic, is now available. I read an earlier draft and I can’t wait to start using it myself. The book is filled with exercises, tools, and examples to help you develop your stories. It’s divided into four main sections, each covering different phases of plotting.

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.

Holly Lisle’s writing clinics on sale

Just wanted to let people know that Holly put her three writing clinics on sale ($2 off each) through Friday (March 9th) at her online e-book shop.

I can personally recommend them, especially the language clinic. I’m currently working on my second language for Miracles and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. The books are clear and concise, and most importantly they make the process fun (and manageable, but fun is more important). If any of this even sounds vaguely interesting you owe it to yourself to check them out (the shop pages contain Table of Contents and excepts):

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.

Whoops

So I ended up not working out a writing plan yesterday. I tried doing it this morning, but stopped when I had twenty minutes left and just started a short story based on a Freemind file I did last July. I wrote for fifteen minutes, which is better than nothing. So the current plan is to finish this story, then write another. We’ll see where that takes me.

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.

Life on Hold

I mentioned before that we were all not feeling very well. I’m mostly better, and so are the kids (Rachel a little more so, Vanessa a little less). Denise, on the other hand, is about the same, and it looks like she’ll stay that way for a while yet. So everything (including the writing) is on hold until things settle down. After having a crazy, exhausting week last week, this one is a lot closer to normal, but not quite there yet. I’m itching to get started on a number of things, but family comes first.

“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!”