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day four, 5266

I dreamed about my story last night. That was… disconcerting a bit.

I am very happy that I feel like I am getting things together in such a way that I have enough structure to propel me forward but not so much that I feel trapped, locked in, and the story has nothing to tell me.

I write as much for my characters to surprise me as anything else.

It always seems so mystical and strange that the characters write the story except that for me, they do. I’m not sure how it psychologically synthesizes, but Gene told me that I needed to write his own story or the story that I told last year wouldn’t make sense.

And now I know how he afforded all those radios on that FBI salary. I always wondered.

I appreciate him letting me in on his secrets.

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day one, 1052

So I thought I’d done my outline, but… no, it was still a bunch of notes in my notebook, waiting to be entered.

ditto with my timeline of events to help me.AND I hadn’t finished either 1939 or 1944’s research yet!

I really need to not mark things off my to-do list until they are, you know, to-done.

Still: kick ass opener. Really happy about it. And tomorrow, hopefully, I won’t have to muck about with preliminaries anymore.

another bonus: I got to call my dad for airplane help and I have an excuse to look at Jane’s with him.

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Slump!

Only made it into chapter 3 with my revisions so far. The hardest part at the moment is not to charge ahead excitedly.

How much is it appropriate to hold back, save for later? How much should be done in the moment?

I don’t just want to keep writing the beginning over and over again.

Still, lots of work started for November as well. I’m hoping that will reduce the amount of pre-revision work (but not restrict me from exploring).

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Editing and planning….

CampNaNoWriMo

I’ve started the editing process. I set up a plan which vaguely goes like this:
Prep:

  • cut all chapters into scenes
  • mark thematic elements
  • character lists
  • mark point of view
  • short research as necessary

Draft 2

  • Scene organization
  • place scenes in structurs [start with major ones]
  • placeholders for insertions
  • write missing scenes as go through draft from beginning to end

Draft 3

  • Scene arc
  • treat scenes as small stories
  • review internal scene integrity
  • full rewrite, beginning to end

Draft 4

Fact Checking

Draft 5 and onward

Word-level revision

The plan is to get through draft two in September and then three in October. Once that’s done I’ll have a reading draft to show to some initial readers to see what they think overall. The last two+ drafts could take a year. It’s hard to work too much on that in advance.

At any rate, this will free me up for:

NaNoWriMo 2011

Generally, I’ve been what in NaNo they call a pantser—that is, I do everything by the seat of my pants. This year I want to try to write from an outline. Generally this kills it for me, but I am hoping it won’t tank my November draft entirely. Also, one of the characters in my draft from last year—well, his backstory kind of took over into its own story, and I’d like to run with it.