Weekly Writing Progress
DLA (revisions): Read-through/initial plotting complete
24C (drafting): 1,935 new words
Last week was a good writing week. I didn’t hit all of my goals (24C should be quite a bit further along), but I did write consistently and I like what I got, plus it’s been a long time since I even wrote a full thousand words in a week, and I got nearly double that. So I’m happy with that progress.
Also importantly, I finished the read-through and initial plotting of DLA, which is good, but a bit disheartening. This is exactly the reason I’d like to start doing some rudimentary plotting *before* I draft a story. DLA is a mess…because I didn’t know what story I wanted to write until the second to last chapter (apparently).
Needless to say, this book is going to require a “mostly rewrite”, with little bits I can reuse here and there. That’s okay though – I prefer drafting to revising anyways, so it will actually be more fun to just rewrite the majority of it. Especially since I know what the main plot needs to be now, and also, because I worked out a lot of things about the setting last week that I was waffling on before.
I want this book to be the first in a growing collection of stories all set in the same fictional town/area here in Montana. I was having trouble kind of sussing that out until I had an epiphany about it last week, while I was thinking about the rewrite for this story, as well as another MS I have drafted and need to go through the same process with. I really got to noodling hard about the name of the town (because my original name is kind of a popular use thing not just here in my state, but in other states as well), and once I hit on a name, all these other details just sort of started popping up in my head that started making the town and its founding families (and heirs, which will feature prominently in these books I’m working on) seem very real and like a place I wanted to know more about.
That’s always a good sign.
I wrote a more in-depth post about this on my personal blog, so visit The Variety Pages for more on that.
In the meantime, now that I know where I want to go with this story, I need to re-plot it so that it makes sense, and then get to writing. Since it’s basically going to be a full rewrite, I’ll work on plotting it and really getting my setting and the family trees lined out this week, and then next week I’ll start the rewrite, since the deadline for the first draft of 24C is Friday the 13th (fitting for this particular story, methinks).
I’m kind of excited to do this rewrite, because it’ll be the first draft I’ve written with a loose outline, ever. So I’m curious to see if that makes it easier/quicker to write, or if it makes it more of a slog. Either way, it’ll be a good experiment, and I’m hoping for the former and a new, quicker writing process to latch onto in the end. Fingers crossed.
So this week’s writing goals are pretty simple. Finish the first draft of BD, and complete a plot line and setting history for DLA.
As far as publishing goes, I also downloaded several images of beets for the BD cover and advertising, and I spent way too much time getting my email addresses “authenticated” so that nefarious hackers online will stop spoofing them to send out spam, and my legitimate emails won’t immediately get sent to receiver’s spam boxes anymore. Since I’m getting closer to publishing things again (yay!) I want to revamp and start sending out newsletters again. I can’t really do that if people won’t be able to find my emails in their inboxes.
I think I have everything all fixed though, which is a relief. So now this week I can focus on making the cover for BD, and then deciding whether to stay with MailChimp for my newsletters or moving them to a different platform.
So much to do, so little time, but it’s all coming together, slowly.
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