Where are you? (in your novel)

indianroads said:

3rd edit of the plot outline is complete

Click to expand...

I never thought of "perfecting" an outline as editing. I like it. I always thought of the process more as working the outline till it is finished. I think I'll try that for a new outline I'll be starting soon.

Enlightened said:

I never thought of "perfecting" an outline as editing. I like it. I always thought of the process more as working the outline till it is finished. I think I'll try that for a new outline I'll be starting soon.

Click to expand...

For me, a lot of the early editing amounts to sorting - getting events in order, working out dialog so the conversation moves smoothly and doesn't bounce around. Editing the plot outline before I start on the first draft allows me to get the larger chunks in order on the first shot.

Everyone has their own method - writing is art, and as such it's an individual expression and technique.

Oh dear! One of the orchestra's first violinists has fallen ill. Lily leaps to the rescue, and...

I didn't think the thing I was writing was going to turn into a novel, but here we are. What complicates matters is that it's probably even more unpublishable than the rest of the fare clogging up my hard drive.

The MC is currently at futuristic Martian Burning Man, and I'm about to write a bunch of scenes that are really weird and make me really uncomfortable.

I'm putting my current novel on hold and going back to my first WIP to apply what I've learned and look at it objectively. Hopefully, in this iteration, it will make it to completion.

Running through my first draft of Deviation - Chapters 1 - 4 are done(ish).

My MC has a close relationship with a large self-aware mechanical spider - which is odd, since I hate spiders.

I just finished short story number 4 in my linked short story collection. That means I'm halfway through the book.

Reading the entire formatted manuscript out loud, word by word, to find typos for the formatter to fix. Just over halfway through and have found 18 typos of various sorts. Another 11 that aren't typos but might be better rephrased. Not too bad, but more than I wanted.

Beginning, and realizing character/motivation was a bit too vague to be interesting to most people. Hopefully this revision will come out as much more fleshed-out and understandable/interesting.

I'm in the middle. It is a slog, and now I'm on forums procrastinating lol

Lily is going to listen to FDR's last fireside chat before Pearl Harbor, but I'm not sure how I'm going to handle it.

In retrospect as characters discuss what they heard? Her reactions during the chat as she takes in FDR's words? Maybe just her internal reactions afterward, because our Lily has had a bellyful of what she sees as FDR avoiding a very necessary conflict.

Thinking...thinking...

Page one of something new. Already tired.

Just finished the manuscript for a fantasy novel. It seems like it's gonna be more hardcore than I thought it was. Just learned about Copula spiders and I just did a lot of editing to fix that.

I don't even want to go through my older 100k word Battletech fanfic...that's a lotta spiders...

I finished short story #5 but it is really short compared to my other short stories. It's about 1,300 words shorter than my previous shortest. Oh well, I can fix that later.

Writing about four chapters simultaneously. Got ideas on how to start each one, so I want to get them written down before the muse escapes me, but I'm stuck on each one.

So that's fun.

Thankfully each one is with a different POV character, so they don't need to flow directly from one another, so long as the threads meet in the end.
But on the plus side: introduced a (minor) character I've had kicking around in my head for about 15 years (with a different, better name) and I managed to bring in a plot point I thought I wouldn't be able to reconcile with the direction my story's going.

I'm between novels in a series. Cliffhanger for the previous one: Hilda was holding her brother at knifepoint, because the spirit possessing her broke her will through sleep deprivation.

Currently on book #2 of my 4 book series. Here's the last bit I worked on today: "He handed Amy and Raylana a dagger, then turned and headed to the door with them following behind. Axton felt his fangs indent his lips as he thought menacingly of what he wanted to do."


It’s time to kill.

Back to Lily's volume #1 and trying to introduce Old Mrs. Cotton.

Problem is, there's just too much to that character to cram into one discrete scene. The first time I wrote it, I'd buried her most important characteristic: the woman cheats at cards.

I've ordered the proofs and am drumming the table impatiently waiting for them to arrive.

I just finished Story #6 out of 8 in Barney, Mr. Thomas, and the Alligator Creature

In Story #7 Barney and Mr. Thomas are going back to Clone Island where they get to see their my goofiest charterers, Dan and Baaston, again.

I finally figured out a structure for the WIP and writing it is a lot easier now.

Just started writing book #6 for the year on Friday, have the first chapter done and this morning, even though I rarely write on weekends, I got about a thousand words of chapter 2 done.

In the final throes of NaNoWriMo 2019, marking 16 for 16. I'll need to do some further research and fill in the blanks later if I want to make this a "real" manuscript, but I'll probably shelve it for a while and turn back to the project I was working on in October.

FINALLY back to work on Lily's volume #4. It's Oakland/Berkeley 1939, and she's nursing a professor of philosophy who is suffering a resurgence of gout.

Lily suspects his recalcitrant cook, and indeed, said cook claims "sweetbreads" don't count as organ meats (forbidden in cases of gout) because they're bread.

But the fun part is that I get to write said cook sneaking her ill-fitting dentures in or out when she thinks herself unobserved. Lily, of course, observes. Forbidden foods AND poor hygiene!

Well, I've actually "finished" writing my book. I still need to reread and self edit a lot of it before I feel I can share it with beta readers. And I know I want to add in a little more with a few characters. But I am THRILLED to have actually "finished" a piece.