Where are you? (in your novel)

Officially finished the 2nd of five sections of my draft 0. Seems like I'm following a five-act structure. Characters are holding up well. All good news.

Spent an hour and a half starting section 3. Then I reread what I'd written only to determine that at least 1/2 of it, possibly all of it, is the characters realizing there are plot holes in their own story and complaining about it to each other. I think it's time to lay aside the computer and take a thinking distracting break.

Kat M said:

Officially finished the 2nd of five sections of my draft 0. Seems like I'm following a five-act structure. Characters are holding up well. All good news.

Spent an hour and a half starting section 3. Then I reread what I'd written only to determine that at least 1/2 of it, possibly all of it, is the characters realizing there are plot holes in their own story and complaining about it to each other. I think it's time to lay aside the computer and take a thinking distracting break.

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Yeah, I hate it when my characters talk back and complain to me. It happens more times than I'd like to admit.

angeliz2k said:

Holy mother-bleeping-Jesu, I'm done. This WIP is done.

The denouement went down a lot faster than I thought it would, and there it is, done. I'm happy about it but not bouncing off the walls. I've completed enough mss now that I'm not bowled over by completing another. But I am VERY proud of this one.

I'm not sure I'm not sad it's over...

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Hey, congrats. I remember how that feels, vaguely.

I've just finished Act I. The foster kids just electrocuted the mad scientist with his own pet robo-spider. lol Can you guess the age group?

Funny thing about my book is that, while I did a very detailed outline, I have hefty editing notes within it already: Remove so and so character, Alter scene order, Change character history a smidge, etc.

My story is slowly starting to reveal itself to me. I know I'm going to have one hell of an editing time, but I can actually see some of the parts of the story further down the plot. I'm just really struggling with these two characters talking to each other. It feels so stilted and I'm honestly just trying to get words down but I'm cringing so hard. I know I can fix it later, but it just hurts. I need to go talk to people and remember how people talk to one another

I just cut out a chapter and am now embarking on the chore of changing all the MC's POV chapters that follow the deletion. I think — I could be wrong, that happens sometimes — that I have finally figured out what has been bothering me about the book. Hoping it's an easy fix. We shall see.

50k! My goal for this first draft is 55k, so I'm almost done. Just need to finish up this chapter and then the next.

Spindle and Vince (her brother) are booking it for the escape pods after fighting their dad's evil boss.

I'm close to finishing and even closer to rewriting an entire arc in a different way. I've just concluded it will be better if I approach it differently...so I'm beginning at the beginning and making some major changes. SO...close to finishing and close to restarting.

About two-thirds done with Act II. The kids, having been placed in a secluded private school for their safety, were just caught by a mystery villain that is pulling the strings behind the scenes. He seems to be one step ahead of everyone!

Last night, I wrote the first draft of chapter one and already I can see a problem. It starts off with the county sheriff investigating, but in chapter two, the FBI is going to have to be called in, so what happens to the sheriff? He can continue working with the FBI, but then we have the sheriff and his deputies plus the FBI agents, of which there need to be at least two. So, already we have five people just in law enforcement. I suppose the villain can kill some of them off to make it more manageable, but then more law enforcement might get called in. And then we have the victim's families and friends. If I kill them off, that could lead to even more characters. At this point, the number of characters is growing exponentially.

And since the sheriff is played by Tommy Lee Jones (a young Tommy Lee Jones), he's the star of the novel. Maybe the FBI agents are bumbling idiots, so the sheriff remains the main character and just deals with the FBI when he has to.

Hmmm... something to think about when I take the dog for a walk...

Encountering a massive edit, spawned from line edit, and crossing my fingers that my neck muscles won't spasm with the furious typing.

55k! This was my goal for this draft, but I still have some writing to do. I still have to include another battle and the epilogue.

An informative has just come back from checking out a blip on the radar. Friend or foe?

I'm working on chapter two. Two people have already been murdered and three more people are about be. The community will be in a state of panic. Plus, the MC's wife was murdered four years ago, which led him to lose faith in the world. And his son is in prison for trying to end factory farms in some way (as yet to be determined).

YES! I finished the first draft of my YA sci-fi, Puppet People! It comes out at 55,869.

I'm currently about one-eighth of the way done with my first draft of a sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel. I intend for it to go out to 80,000 words, so wish me luck!

As for where I am in the plot of the first draft, it's been about a year after the incident described in the previous chapter (in which an angry mob stormed their equivalent of city hall), and now the High Priest is filling in for the God of Fire at this harvest festival, the god in question being unavailable due to crippling illness.

I had a reader contact me today and say he was triggered by a portion of my latest novel. The antagonists are members of a religious cult that worships fire. The reader's mother was involved with People's Temple and was planning to bring him and his siblings to Jonestown... were the cult leader, Jim Jones, made his people drink poison kool-aid. I'm questioning whether I was too heavy handed with the preaching of the cult priests... or maybe I was accurate. The theme of the book was concerning intolerance: racial, cultural, etc.

On one hand, I'm glad the reader had a reaction to my writing, but I'm also sad that he was triggered.

Lily, who considers "nursing the hypo-chondriacal" her specialty, has been assigned to one such patient, a middle aged lady who's broken her wrist and is convinced that wearing a cast incapacitates her entirely.

Lily's job is to gently, subtly, undetectably induce the patient to spend Christmas with her less-than-plesant family.

Lily's writer's job is to show that--not an easy task.

Editing the scene where Ralenna has to deal with Saxon captives and learns that her father sent someone else to take care of it because he didn't trust her. She is seriously pissed.

Cecila only feels alive when she's in training (demolition, gun range, offensive driving, obstacle course, hand to hand, etc) or attempting to seduce her instructors. The mind F of training for a classified and potential lethal mission is weighing on her.

I have to go through more descriptions of her training before the hammer that brings her inner suicidal streak to rage.

Just finished the first quick bullet point outline for my next novel, Deviation, Extinction #4. It looks like there will be 30 chapters, and WC should be in the 100K to 105K range, which is where I'd like it. I like the characters and the story, and am anxious to see what I discover when I write it.

I'll do at least two more outlines before the actual writing begins. Character profiles still to be done (although I already know a lot about them). As the story is set 500-600 years in the future aboard a starship that has fallen into dystopian gangland, I need to work on the verbiage and phrasing of the characters. There's a second group of characters they will meet that have been living on an ice world, so I need to figure out their vernacular as well.

Writing is a lot of work, but I absolutely love it.

Launching one book. About to poke the last beta on the next one. Haven't started the one after that yet.

Thinking about trashing the last half of the wip that is giving me so much grief, but I've been thinking about doing so for a very long time. Meanwhile I keep on plugging through the edit.

Bob Kelton is sitting in a board room during contract negotiations, watching the college administration sweat out the pressure that the union's chief negotiatior is putting on the administration, and WELL AWARE that the school will find some means of REVENGE against him and his negotiating team for it.

It's 1941, Oakland California.

Lily, a private duty nurse, is scheduled to pick up a "post surgical" at Peralta Hospital, a Catholic institution rumored to be run by fearsome sisters. She dares not be late.

...and yet, she's been given a ticket to an open rehearsal of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and she LOVES symphony music.

She might be able to manage both, but only if everything falls into place.

3rd edit of the plot outline is complete, and I'm ready to start in on the first draft of the novel. I love this story, it's gonna be fun to write.