KINDLY IGNORE THIS THREAD

dondomat

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KINDLY IGNORE THIS THREAD




*****


Decided that I've been at a writing level plateau long enough and it's time to aim for speed. Enough with the fiddling.

Gonna write a fat epic thriller (titled "MK" for the purposes of this thread) in three weeks I have free from everything, or almost, and find a better agent, and have it published quickly to success and acclaim.

This focus week starts April 13th 2015.

Gonna write daily updates after a day's work.

And there was much rejoicing.
 
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Capability

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Good luck-- I'm looking forward to hearing updates about his one. Graham Greene wrote _The Confidential Agent_ in six weeks... if you get half of that (by whichever metric, wordcount, quality or success), you're doing pretty damn well.
 

dondomat

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Day 1=15% of MK outlined

Reporting at the end of the first day:D

Today I was rather easily distracted, but when I did work, the immersion happened quickly. The mind worked well, and the fingers tended to hit mostly the right keys even at high speed.

Tomorrow I'll try to double the output--> start earlier, and be on the ready against various distractions.

In order for this hyper-productivity plan to work, I've stopped reading for the duration. I have a tidy pile of books on my desk, which to flip open and skim a page in order to get some basic inspiration via sympathetic magic--a Dean Koontz, a Leslie Charteris, a Raymond Chandler, a Stephen King, an Ian Fleming, and two of mine--but aside from this no reading whatsoever. For the duration of these weeks the reading/writing circuitry is busy only with my manuscript, and a few percent set aside for Absolute Write updates and terse email exchanges.

...Around 18.00, when most of the work was done, I did some ritualistic double-guitar turbo-improv on the laptop microphone, in order to keep the creative chemistry flowing, and then wrapped up the last four chapters that had to be outlined by plan.

The Official Day One jam.

The plan keeps expanding number-wise, because my chapters keep swelling, and since I prefer compact chapters less than 2K in length, I split them along their natural fault-lines. So far every 5 planned chapters turn into about 8. We'll see how this tendency continues. I might end up with 150 chapters in a 160K book, or something.
 
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lizo27

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Good luck with it, Dondomat!
 

dondomat

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Best wishes, but I'm trying to fathom how this can work. Spillane's books are all very short, uncomplicated, and direct; King's . . . not so much.

caw

I'm not jumping in unprepared. For months my desk looked like I was planning to take over the northern hemisphere. Now I'm simply trying to turn all the notes into a novel a coupla times faster than I'm accustomed to doing:D


35jyy4k.jpg



The stacks of printed out papers are characters arcs, subplot arcs, important scenes, themes, and concepts, even snatches of important dialogues, to be inserted later. ...I have notebooks that are raw materials for stacks like that for other franchises, biding their time. That's how my mind works: while I'm working on a sci-fi adventure in 2012, I keep getting ideas for a book I plan to write in 2017, and I write those ideas down. When the time comes to work on this project--I consolidate the scattered ideas into word documents, and then shit gets real.

That big piece of paper at the center is now stuck to my writing room's door; the lower horizontal line is the cast of POV characters, the left vertical line are the days during which the plot takes place, so now I keep popping over to remind myself what happens to whom in day three, for example, and erase some stuff and add new stuff, as the story undergoes the inevitable little changes. Stuff that was supposed to happen in the evening of day one is now moved to the middle of day two; chapters keep subdividing, a few are merging.

...And it's not really "King structure". This was just an on-the-fly example of a more labyrinthine multi-POV thing. In reality it's more like a Tom Clancy novel written by Ben Elton, or a Dean Koontz one written by Victor Pelevin, or a Graham Masterton one written by Tom Robbins, or a Robert Ludlum one written by Vladimir Sorokin, but that kind of elaboration does not make for a snappy thread title.
tinypic.com
 
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dondomat

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Day 2=25% of MK outlined

Double yesterday's output? Far from it. The deeper I wade into the story, the more questions I have to keep asking and answering to do with the plot's minutiae, the slower I get.

But still good going. Very good going. One thing: the structure is complex, not to say fragmented, and it takes faith in Past Me that I've/he's planned it in a way that works out and makes sense, because when submerged during the actual writing, the story falls apart into a million disconnected strands. Have to keep remembering that there is an underlying unifying principle that isn't visible to me now during the outlining, but will be visible once I take all the separate word-files for each chapter, and start planting them chronologically on separate document which will be the actual manuscript.

Here is the jam session of day two.
 
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dondomat

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Day 3=35% of MK outlined

I tend to panic when outlining. I squeeze and squeeze my mind and simply can't figure out how exactly stuff is supposed to happen in chapter X. And then I remember to trust myself. I have foreseen such moments. I've prepared cheats to help.

So I go and search around my extensive documentation, until I find it. Problem solved.

And sometimes it even turns out that in the throes of planning enthusiasm, I've already outlined an important scene months ago, and planted it in the relevant document in my computer, so when I reach this crucial moment--past me has already done the work--making current me very happy.

Believing in your currently writing me, and the future editing me is super important, but trusting past me who has prepared the elements of this book is a must. Frequently I have to fall back on past me, and thus far he has always been there to catch me.

Past me has actually laid the foundations that help my enormous cast of primary POV characters, secondary POV characters, and supporting cast, to exhibit different traits almost instantly. It's not something I have to worry about during the writing itself. Yay.

The preparations and brainstorming sessions and preemptive scribbling of key scenes is really paying off now.

Today's Official Jam for Day Three. Started out as a Sabbathy idea (no sun today here, just twilighty clouds) but then the usual quasi-1980's Germanic/1990's Scandinavian speedy stuff also made the obligatory appearance. I need this release of infantile optimism at the end of the day to keep the prana churning.
 
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dondomat

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Day 4=Other Things Day

No writing; no jamming.

Other thinging!

*EDIT* actually did outline two chapters in the evening. Let's add another half percent to the outlining count :D
 
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dondomat

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Day 5=40% of MK outlined

The grinding struggle continues. Suddenly a whole hefty part of a subplot, where two POV characters intersect, seems on the verge of being obsolete. Or rather, it seems on the verge of me not being able to make it emotionally believable.

I'll have to figure it out tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Just a hickup on the way, like every time.

The official number 4 jam session
 

dondomat

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Decided to wrap up the daily updates.

Here's today's jam--and that's that.

I'll swing by to post to say when:

the outline is done
the fleshing out is done
the editing is done
the submission to agents begins,
and so on.
 

dondomat

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Welp, outline of novel done. Approx 130 chapters, plus intro and outro. Tomorrow I'm printing it out, scribbling for a day or two or three, and then diving right back in, this time for the fleshing.
Turbo blues jam
I must say, the "Spillane" part of the experiment can already be written off. Now it's, hopefully, "John Saul speed" and...well why the hell not, "John Saul complexity". Can still pull it off, probably.
 
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dondomat

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It now appears that the novel in question will be the size of Koontz's Strangers. Not what I initially planned, but we go where it takes us.