October 2021 Challenge - Build a Writing Habit!

Cindyt

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Day 15

WORD COUNT 179

A DEADLY SPILL OF SCARLET (Draft 3) – Edits

Growing Up Buford blog - I’ve decided The Watcher is more suited for The Hunger series than for Halloween. This is the first year I won’t have a Halloween story unless one jumps into my memory. Hmmmm…

Helix - Better luck next time. :Hug2:

Neither – How are you saving your WIP? I use WORD 16 and had problems with it crashing until I started using the AutoSave option.
 
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Helix

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Day 16: Well, I thought I'd just lie down under the fan and do some reading this afternoon. I got the first bit sorted, but ended up having a very long nanna power nap. No work at all today. But I did get another piece up on Medium.
 
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Taylor Harbin

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I don’t think I’m going to get any story work done. I’ve put both stories away because they just feel wrong somehow. Wish I knew why my subconscious is revolting. I’ve written stories with multiple elements at work and they came out great. Yet this time travel piece vexes me to no end. This will be the second time I’ve scrapped a draft to start anew. I’m so sick of not being able to finish things, but when I lose interest like this I can’t go on. Drives me nuts to spend so much effort only to have to start over. Maybe I never knew what the story’s supposed to be about in the first place…
 

Lea123

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DAY 16:

Edited Chapter one after some feedback on the three line thread (turns out the its / he mix up had happened a few times in the chapter). It's a big deal for me because no one knows I write, no one has read my writing... the quick demo pieces for the kids at school doesn't count.

Wrote a random scene for fun. It's about an issue one of the characters has that arises more in book 2. It won't be in the book but I like writing them for me, I suppose...

Read through 5,000 words, edited some typos and corrected some speech punctuation. Still quit tired today. Next week is the final week at work before half term so I'm hoping I'll have more energy in a week.
 

Nether

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Day 16 was 3,571 words. I'd hoped for a super Saturday of sorts, since I'd hit about 2.9k words early on, but then I just never really got to it, so it's an up day instead of a super-up, changing momentum day.

Granted, part of the reason I didn't get back to it (or swing for the fences) was because I was proofing book 6. I finished with 33 more pages, bringing me to 51 so I can query that one agent I'd been meaning to contact... well, after I finish my 1-3 page synopsis.

While proofing, I realized I used “a little” three times in the same paragraph :LOL: I wound up changing two and, after some consideration, left one as-is. The only other repetition I’ve run into was in describing and referencing an area where a character was injured. For the most part, the prose was relatively clean. There are a few things I might change here and there, but my biggest issue is omitting words which I often miss when proofing anyway.

Anyway, I'm at 40,799 words into book 8 now, and I'm sitting at 90.7% of my 2.5k word daily quota (my daily average is 2,236 atm). If I just stay at my average, I probably won't close out book 8 by the end of the month unless it winds up just being 71k words. I'll have to make up for lost time somewhere.

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Cindy -- I manually save periodically. afaik, I don't have autosave enabled, mostly because I don't trust it. And I save a back-up every 2 days, which I'll email myself and then I add a back-up to an external storage device every 7 days. My version is Office and Student 2016, which is the version that was on the laptop when I borrowed it. Traditionally, I've used Apache OpenOffice at home.

Taylor -- Personally, I'd just power through it... but that can be torture at times, particularly when I decided to power through another 40-50k words in a novel. (And I should note that the novel I hated writing hasn't read that badly while I was proofing it... although I'm also more towards the beginning whereas I felt like I was struggling more and more as I went along.)
 

The Second Moon

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Day 16 - I wrote 394 words on Apocalypse Stoppers: The Hivemind Children. I also revised a poem.

Right now it is 7 in the morning. I am eating a Hot Pocket and listening to Carley Rae Jepsen's This Kiss. I sound like a poor college student with a bad crush. Truth be told, I am in in collage but not so poor that my diet consists only of Hot Pockets. BTW, I don't have a crush. I was just in the mood for happy pop music.

Nether - I called it quits on YA because, it brought back memories of high school. I hated high school with a passion. It was a bad time for my social anxiety.

Cindyt - Oh I have so many WIPs planned that I won't run out of things to write for a long time. I write for adults and MG. YA was just too much for me.

I'll be back later with the day's update. (As Schwarzenegger said in the first draft of 'Terminator'.)

:roll: :roll: :roll:



 

Taylor Harbin

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Day 16 was 3,571 words. I'd hoped for a super Saturday of sorts, since I'd hit about 2.9k words early on, but then I just never really got to it, so it's an up day instead of a super-up, changing momentum day.

Granted, part of the reason I didn't get back to it (or swing for the fences) was because I was proofing book 6. I finished with 33 more pages, bringing me to 51 so I can query that one agent I'd been meaning to contact... well, after I finish my 1-3 page synopsis.

While proofing, I realized I used “a little” three times in the same paragraph :LOL: I wound up changing two and, after some consideration, left one as-is. The only other repetition I’ve run into was in describing and referencing an area where a character was injured. For the most part, the prose was relatively clean. There are a few things I might change here and there, but my biggest issue is omitting words which I often miss when proofing anyway.

Anyway, I'm at 40,799 words into book 8 now, and I'm sitting at 90.7% of my 2.5k word daily quota (my daily average is 2,236 atm). If I just stay at my average, I probably won't close out book 8 by the end of the month unless it winds up just being 71k words. I'll have to make up for lost time somewhere.

********************
*****************
********************

Cindy -- I manually save periodically. afaik, I don't have autosave enabled, mostly because I don't trust it. And I save a back-up every 2 days, which I'll email myself and then I add a back-up to an external storage device every 7 days. My version is Office and Student 2016, which is the version that was on the laptop when I borrowed it. Traditionally, I've used Apache OpenOffice at home.

Taylor -- Personally, I'd just power through it... but that can be torture at times, particularly when I decided to power through another 40-50k words in a novel. (And I should note that the novel I hated writing hasn't read that badly while I was proofing it... although I'm also more towards the beginning whereas I felt like I was struggling more and more as I went along.)
There was a time when I could power through a draft but now a days I have to go back and fix the foundation if I think it’s got cracks.
 

Lea123

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DAY 17

Edited another chapter. Been a busy weekend with family so I've not been as on it as I'd have liked. I suppose little social breaks here and there are healthy... I need to do it more often.

I'm currently trying to battle through the fear of what happens when my stories end. Like the entire series of them. What happens when it's all set in stone, they're on the page... gone. Done. I can't go back and rewrite or, more of a concern, I can't live through it with them as their stories will be done and the adventures over.

It's like premature mourning.

These guys have been with me since I was a teenager. 15 years I've been fiddling with them, developing their quirks and back stories. They've got me through pretty much 90% of the poop that has hit my metaphorical fan. I know there are several books to go, several stories before it's the end but I'm a forward thinker; it's my downfall.

Currently, it's almost crippling me emotionally.

Perhaps I'm hormonal but even then, I think that often highlights thing I tend to try and bury so that I can function in daily life.

Oh well... 1 more week of slogging it through work. I want to be ready for beta readers by the end of November.
 

Taylor Harbin

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Rediscovered an old story that used to scare the daylights out of me. I’m going to rewrite it.
 

Cindyt

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Day 16

Day off

I continued getting ready to move so I won’t have as much to do that week.

Moon – Oh, I’ve no doubt you have lots of stuff. I hated high school too because—in a word—bullies. But it was really no different that life with my parents. Writing about those nightmares in the Growing Up Buford (in a small town dysfunctional family) blog has healed me as much as I’ll ever be healed.
 

Nether

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Day 17 was 2,311. It was on the low side for a Sunday, and I ought to have done more, but... eh.

At this point, it's just a matter of keeping to it. I have enough of an idea as to what I want to happen to wing the rest, even if I still have some blank spots and I'm making a few things up as I go along (which isn't how I like approaching writing, but it is what it is at times).

I also wrote my long synopsis for book 6 today (which I'll probably tweak at some point), and then sent that query out which means I've done a whole *two* queries for that book so far. I'm probably try to pick up the pace this week. I'll mention that all of this non-drafting stuff gets to be exhausting. And there's just really no end to it.

I sound like a poor college student with a bad crush. Truth be told, I am in in collage

Which is a humorous typo that reminds me of... I think it was the Simpsons where one character was saying "collage" and hoping somebody would mistake it for college.

but not so poor that my diet consists only of Hot Pockets.

Nothing wrong with Hot Pockets. When I was in college, I was so broke I once had popcorn three meals in a row. (I ate a lot of popcorn back in those days.)

Nether - I called it quits on YA because, it brought back memories of high school. I hated high school with a passion. It was a bad time for my social anxiety.

I was going to jokingly suggest writing a dystopian YA where schools no longer existed, but I think the YA dystopia market has just about bottomed out.

I'm currently trying to battle through the fear of what happens when my stories end. Like the entire series of them. What happens when it's all set in stone, they're on the page... gone. Done. I can't go back and rewrite or, more of a concern, I can't live through it with them as their stories will be done and the adventures over.

Spin-off time? :p

Right now, my big series is planned as being 13 novels (and I've drafted the first three so far), which started off with just 7 planned (possibly even fewer at the very beginning). Beyond that, I'm tempted to write a few spin-offs featuring supporting characters in main roles and major characters in supporting roles (or just referenced as doing things).

If I just stuck to that series, I could finish drafting it in probably the next year or two (partly since it's a lot faster to draft things in the same series), but I don't want to rush through it. My bigger concern is just getting things into a saleable/marketable state, and then just the downstream effects that come with making edits to earlier books.

However, going further off the rails, I want to release an alternate telling of the first three books as a dual-POV where the overarching events mirror the first three (more so #1 & #2) with vastly different outcomes (particularly where the MC and sole POV from the original series is concerned). And that kind of plan doesn't hinge on anything, since I don't need to wait to see what happens with the other books.

While I'm attached to the characters and setting, I think there are plenty of ways to continue to get mileage from them after the core series is done, even without doing something like a follow-up series that continues the story years later. (And keeping in mind that many of my characters will have died by the end of the core books.)

Although, at the same time, I like a lot of my characters, so there's always something. Whenever I get close to finishing drafting a book, I'm usually thinking about the sequel, even if I hadn't intended for there to be a sequel
 

Lea123

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Spin-off time? :p

Right now, my big series is planned as being 13 novels (and I've drafted the first three so far), which started off with just 7 planned (possibly even fewer at the very beginning). Beyond that, I'm tempted to write a few spin-offs featuring supporting characters in main roles and major characters in supporting roles (or just referenced as doing things).

If I just stuck to that series, I could finish drafting it in probably the next year or two (partly since it's a lot faster to draft things in the same series), but I don't want to rush through it. My bigger concern is just getting things into a saleable/marketable state, and then just the downstream effects that come with making edits to earlier books.

However, going further off the rails, I want to release an alternate telling of the first three books as a dual-POV where the overarching events mirror the first three (more so #1 & #2) with vastly different outcomes (particularly where the MC and sole POV from the original series is concerned). And that kind of plan doesn't hinge on anything, since I don't need to wait to see what happens with the other books.

While I'm attached to the characters and setting, I think there are plenty of ways to continue to get mileage from them after the core series is done, even without doing something like a follow-up series that continues the story years later. (And keeping in mind that many of my characters will have died by the end of the core books.)

Although, at the same time, I like a lot of my characters, so there's always something. Whenever I get close to finishing drafting a book, I'm usually thinking about the sequel, even if I hadn't intended for there to be a sequel
I've already planned a sequel from one character's POV. I've sort of envisioned it as following the family through the generations as there are a few different directions to take it in and each one will have to solve their own section of the issue... and there's the theme of is anything really over? There's no such thing as total peace and harmony, right?

I'm just too soppy at heart. Might be that person that lurks and writes fan fiction about their own writing... that's a thing, right? If not, it really should be.

DAY 18 - nothing done. Daughter had a massive melt down at bed time. I'm too hungry to focus. Work has been Poop with a capital P. Might read through some 'fan fic' type scenes I've written on my phone from a comfort perspective. Can't even read my book I'm that wound up. Ah well...
 

Nether

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Day 18 was 4,425 words overall -- 3,871 to book 8, and the remaining 644 to a short story.

My late session -- the third, kinda catch-up session -- for yesterday was a little short and unproductive, but I'd already hit my quota (2.5k) and target (3k+) so that didn't really matter. The actual writing had a lot of dialogue and internal monologuing, which made it a bit quicker. However, I think I might be coming up on another wall soon, since I'm again hitting an area I haven't really thought out. I really should just do whatever I can to wrap the rest up quickly. I could just forward to the final arc, and then write backwards.

At any rate, I don't want to try writing like this again. It was just a terrible idea. The problem is that it keeps working out half the time, and then I think, "Well, sure, I don't really have things planned out, but why don't I give it a go anyway?"

As for the short story, I saw a bunch of listings for flash fiction, and I just thought of something pretty quick which I largely free-wrote. I think I had a rough idea of what I wanted to happen. idk, it was just really quick. I'm not really short it's "flash fiction" (and I spent a little time trying to figure out the nuances there without anyway luck), but it's very short fiction.

It was very light horror. Took me maybe half an hour to write, and then a little while to re-read (the first draft was pretty clean), and then I just immediately submitted it. I might write a few other short stories for those other things, I'll have to see if the spirit moves me. The one big advantage with the really short stuff is that it's quick to draft. And, honestly, the whole reason I went for that was because the other short story was so quick.

The only problem I had with it was that I'd intended it as horror, but it wound up not being all that scary -- probably because of the POV I wound up using for the telling. All the same, it was a bit of fun.

What I thought about afterward, though, was just that the story might be hosted on a website forever, which would lower its value if I tried to toss it in an anthology. (And while the site is a paying market, it's 8-cents a word which doesn't add up to a lot with a 650~ word short story.)
 

Cindyt

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Day 18

WORD COUNT 440

A DEADLY SPILL OF SCARLET (Draft 3) – Edits

Packed up more stuff and pinned lists of important stuff I need to hand carry. It’s getting close.

Moon – Nice 447 word count and interesting title!
 

The Second Moon

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Day 18 - No writing, but a lot of brainstorming.

I went down a rabbit hole after googling "Ents". Turns out they were created by Tolkien and some people have tried to copy the Ents design but since Tolkien's work is not in the public domain yet, they had to change it.

Cindyt- I love the title, too. I made up "Sunling". They are creature of the sun that can make stuff that glows like sunbeams. They also shift shape into canaries.

Nether - I've eaten solely popcorn for dinner.

Lea123 - I personally think every author/writer should be so in love with their work that they gush about it and write fan fic about it.
 
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Taylor Harbin

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This week is going to be very busy so I don’t expect to get a lot done except selecting character names.
 
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CMBright

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I was thinking I would not write on my birthday.
Then I saw cyberpunk in markets, read far enough in the wiki article to get the subgenre and have written 250 words so far today.
 
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Lea123

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DAY 19

Work was better. Busy, but better.

I've written a scene that will be used in a future novel (or something along those lines as I know it'll be changed in a year or so, whenever I sit down to pull it all together). Possibly not until book 3, I think book 2 would be too soon. Anyway, it's quite a nice one and begins a new side to one of the characters and a new angle on a relationship. Also opens up the field ready for the next set of obstacles and emotional hurdles that are needed for events in book 3/4 to happen.

It feels so weird sometimes, writing these things down. Watching them begin on a journey and they're totally oblivious to it all but I know. I can't describe the feeling - it's neither pleasant or unpleasant. It reminds me of nostalgia but in reverse? Is that a thing?

Anyway, I blame the countless hours on the Sims growing up.

2,628 words. Not on my current WIP and there's been no editing today either but this was needed. I had to just write freely.
 

Nether

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Day 19 was 2,513 words.

Despite hitting my daily quota, it wasn't a good writing day. I suspect at least the last 750 or so words will need to be heavily rewritten because the character interaction feels unnatural (and, in general, I haven't liked the characterization so far for the supporting character, but that's a broader issue -- in fact, I imagine this book will need to go through a few sets of beta reads to smooth out some character issues).

In other, not-so-fun news, I realize when I sent that book 6 query the other day with the long synopsis I'd written, I got one of my characters' names wrong. Very stupid mistake, but it partly owes to the fact that I used a shorter variant of that name in the book right before it. So toss that one up on my ever-growing query wall of shame.

I think I need to fix up that long synopsis a bit more before I use it for anything else. My chapter breakdown is a lot clearer, but it's also far longer (4.5 pages). Condensing the entire story to a 1-2 page synopsis was insane; I should have broken the rules and gone for that third page, or at least another half. It probably would have been less of a disqualifier than the 2-page version itself.

Otherwise, I proofed about another 15 pages of book 6 and I planned out a little more (or revised my plans a little) of book 9.

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Moon -- It's always a little confusing which pop culture monsters are in the public domain, and how much of the interpretation in the public domain. I should imagine that there's an easy workaround given the sheer number of tree monsters out there, or you could just go the D&D route and change the name (like how hobbits became halflings).

CMBright -- Happy birthday (unless you dislike birthdays, at which point condolences)

Lea -- Grats on the 2,600+ word day. I've written ahead like that before as well (although, in my case, I think I usually had to revise the whole portion when I did go to write that book). And the Sims was one of those franchises I always kinda wanted to get into, but the gameplay (or I guess lack thereof?) never agreed with me.
 

TStarnes

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Day 17
Apparently object permeance isn't a thing for me, because as soon as I had a few days of not updating my progress, I forgot to do it at all. This is basically a weeks worth of updates condensed.

The Sword of Jupiter: Done ahead of schedule. cover, proofreading, edit, formatting, the whole shabang. Set for launch at the end of the week and marketing all set up.
The Trumpets of Mars: Outlined up to the midpoint. Further behind than I'd like, but progress is being made.
Fanfare: More or less on track still. I've missed some days, but gone over on others. It's not a wash, but I'm still on track to make my deadline.
Extraction: Also started making progress on this finally, but behind schedule quite a bit.
 
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Lea123

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Lea -- Grats on the 2,600+ word day. I've written ahead like that before as well (although, in my case, I think I usually had to revise the whole portion when I did go to write that book). And the Sims was one of those franchises I always kinda wanted to get into, but the gameplay (or I guess lack thereof?) never agreed with me.
I mainly used the Sims to build and design families. If I played them, I almost always abandoned the family the day after. I've always liked the building and story behind it, never the game play.

Thanks - I know I'll end up rewriting it all but it does help set relationships and other events in motion. I've managed to figure out two events that I want to include in that book just from randomly writing that scene. Now, if could just find the same enthusiasm to read through the rest of book one and finish the edits, that would be great!

Nether - that sounds like something I'd do. Or I'd spell it wrong. Eeep.

DAY 20 - did nothing but reread a chapter. Too tired to edit well... got tomorrow off so I'm writing then. :)
 

Cindyt

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Day 19

Added Words

Edited a WIP

Moon – Love the Sunlings!
Taylor – Good luck with the character names
CMBright – Grats on 250 words, and Happy Birthday!
Lea – WTG on 2,628 words
Neither – Congratulations on 2513!
TStarnes – Nice updates!
 
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