5/12 Post

Just finished up my 500 words for the day. I may do some more work tonight, but I wanted to post this so I don't forget again!

5/11 post

Ack! I forgot to post last night. But I did my 500 words like a good little girl. It's coming easier now that I'm past that scene.

5/10 Report

500 words for the day.

But more importantly...

I FINISHED THE GODDAMN SCENE IN THE PLANE!

Thank God.

Chugging

500 words on TOB today. Didn't get anything else done.

I will be so, so happy when I get past this scene. I've been stuck on it for so long, and I'm itching to just get to the island already and explore everything there!

Ahhhh....

I haven't had such a focused, productive writing day in a long, long time. It was really nice-- like taking a walk in the woods and breathing in fresh mountain air after being cooped up in a room with an electric heater and fluorescent lights for two months. I worked for an hour on the phase outline, wrote 500 words in TOB (crappy words, but at the moment I think I need to embrace the philosophy: if you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going), and wrote a long paragraph of Akenam monologuing about his strange relationship with his mentor/nemesis Ruyad (this was an exercise from the Maass book).

Y'know, looking back at the blog archives I see that last spring I fell off the writing train too. And I distinctly remember other frantically productive winters followed by slothful springs. Hm.

Anyway, now that the train has groaned to life, I want to keep it moving straight back into the obsession phase of the Pattern. So, goals ahoy!

For the rest of May:

1) write 500 words a day on TOB, continuing to move the story forward
2) finish phase outline for Part 2
3) complete at least 5 more exercises from TFiF
4) blog here every day, even if just a few lines to report progress

Okay, that's the plan. See you tomorrow, kids!

Back In the Saddle... I Think

Gah. I've had a bad few weeks, writing-wise. But I'm feeling inspiration creeping up again. Today is the first day in a week that I've had a chunk of free time, and I'm going to dive back into TOB. When I left off, I was working my way through a phase outline of Act II, so I'm going to spend an hour on that and see how far I get. I also just read The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass, author of my beloved Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, and I'm planning to slowly work my way through the exercises, since I think reading The Fire in Fiction has provided the spark to reignite (ha! spark! ignite! get it?) my love for Willa, Akenam, and the complicated world of my novel.

I'll report back later.

Checking In

Gah. Sorry for the long silence. It's been a more productive silence than most, however. I have indeed been writing. Not every day, mind you, and not adding words to the actual novel. But the worldbuilding for Akenam's culture was always kind of spotty, so I've been slowly filling in the blanks. I've also been working out details about the other five delegates at the summit with Willa. I'd always filed them under "I'll figure that out when I get there", and... well, I'm almost there.

The bad news is that I haven't accomplished much these past few weeks. The good news is that I can feel my enthusiasm for the story building again, and I know that it's only a matter of time before I'm itching to jump back into the scene I abandoned.

And I've been reading a lot. That's always good news!