If Vice President Harris says I can enjoy the extended weekend, well, who am I to complain?
Hope your extended weekend is a nice one as well! See you soon for regular post!
Fly-by: brb, enjoying the long weekend
Month: May 2021
Current Status: Planning Stuff Out
I’ve been focusing on my outlining and synopsis writing with my current and backburner WIPs this past week, and I’m happy to say that it’s working quite nicely. I’ve managed to reach the end of Act I for one of the current stories, and do some major scene rearrangement and rebuilding for another.
The outcome of all of this is that it’s kind of fascinating to see the difference between “all the ideas are in my head and I have a vague idea where it’s headed” and “here’s the roadmap, have at it”. I mean, I’ve done this kind of preproduction many times before (and to varying degrees) and this time is no different. Just that I’m taking this step more seriously this time out.
Am I going to plan out the entirety of my current WIPs? I don’t know. I probably will with the shorter one, because the more preparation I have ahead of time, the quicker the project is finished. If I keep up with what I’m doing, I’ll probably have a complete synopsis in a couple of weeks and will be able to get to the heavy writing without delay. As for the other one…that’s MU4 if you must know, and that’s going to need a lot of planning due to the way its universe runs, so I think I’ll at least get it to where I feel comfortable with being a few chapters ahead plan-wise, just like the previous trilogy. For every prose chapter I finish off, I’ll add another synopsis chapter as I go.
I’m definitely going to keep this process going if I can. I still want to get back to my plan of self-publishing at least one novel a year, and planning stories out like this will definitely keep me well-stocked in future projects! It’ll also help me when I return to the Day Job World…just like I did with the trilogy, I can easily block out a few chapters ahead during slow time/lunch hour at work, dedicating my evening hours solely to cranking out the prose.
In the meantime, I’m thrilled to be where I am at the moment in these projects…I may not actually be getting any prose wordcount done, but this prep work will definitely open up all kinds of time for it later on.
Writing All The Things
A few days ago I woke up super-early in the morning from an amazing dream and had that classic OMG this needs to be story!! moment, so of course I made sure that I remembered it after sliding back into slumber for a few more hours. And yes, somehow I did in fact remember it! So before it went away and before I distracted myself with any other internetty things like comics and social media drama, I logged onto/dusted off the 750 Words site and hopped to it. I’d originally meant to just work out the bare bones of the idea, but before I knew it, I was writing a full-on synopsis and a few hours later I had three thousand words and a full novel plan written out. [Side note: this once and for all proves that I really do need to work more on eliminating distractions.]
Mind you, that NEVER happens, so I didn’t question it…I just kept working at it until I had it done and finished. [And to top it off, I ended that productive day by finishing off the Diwa & Kaffi revision as well. There wasn’t too much I needed to fix, but I was certainly glad to sign that off so I can start submitting it.]
While I basked in my pride for having gotten so much done that day, I started thinking…what if I started doing this on the regular? I’ve only recently started doing synopses and outlines on a semi-regular basis, so maybe it’s time I made it a full-on part of my writing process once and for all. I thought about my other open projects on the various burners and thought, wait…maybe this will work better if I’ve got a map to work with.
So a few days later I opened up the 750 again with a test run for another complete synopsis — this time for a project I’d started/stopped/trunked/revived several times over the years. It’s not an impossible story to write, I’ve just had constant problems figuring out how it should be written. This time out, I just focused on creating a short and tight synopsis, devoid of all the moods, distractions and lingering issues. End result: another success! I figured out why it hadn’t worked in the past, and how I could approach it from a slightly different angle and have success with it. So yay me, another future project!
Which leaves me with the current two front-burner projects, both of which I’m still feeling a bit tetchy about. Neither of them have a synopsis at this time.
The issue with both is, you guessed it: lack of direction. I know where I’m going and even where I want it to end up, but there’s still a high level of flailing on both. And when I flail, the longer it takes for me to get these projects done.
So my plan for the next couple of days is to work them both out with synopses. Sure, I should have done this a long time ago, but considering both of these were started right at the start of the pandemic (and at the end of my Former Day Job) in early 2020, real life and Diwa & Kaffi sort of got in the way and I kind of forgot that this approach does in fact work sometimes (okay, most times). If I can give myself a clearer path for both of these stories, then I’ll be much happier and I won’t be flailing nearly as much.
Will it work? Who knows. I hope it will. I have faith in it now.
Writing: Coming Back from Sick Days
On the plus side, I received my second COVID vaccine shot on Thursday morning, so I am up to date! I no longer need to worry about if or when I’d ever get them taken care of! (A has already gotten her first shot and will be getting the follow-up at the end of this month.) We’ll still be wearing masks until further notice, of course, but we’re cool with that.
On the negative side, the side-effects did a number on my by Thursday afternoon. Like the first shot, I started feeling the brain fogginess and the lack of energy. This time out, however, I’d also started getting full-body aches. Like EVERYWHERE. My fingers hurt. My eyes hurt. Everything hurt. Somehow a migraine slipped in there as well. All told, it wasn’t a sharp you need to see a doctor pain, but just complete okay you’ve been up for ninety-three hours you really need to sleep now exhaustion. I even had a slight fever. Which meant that Friday was spent here in Spare Oom doing nothing except listening to new music releases and maybe watching some videos. [Thankfully it started going away by Friday night and by Saturday I felt totally fine. Invigorated, even.]
And as I usually reserve the weekends for catching up on emails, doing errands and cleaning house, I didn’t have much time to do any actual writing work that needed doing. This means that I’m now about five days behind on finishing this latest Diwa & Kaffi revision and that’s bugging the hell out of me right now.
See, my problem is that I always feel guilty when I take a sick day from writing. I’m always thinking, ‘Come on…you’d just be sitting on your butt listening to music. Don’t be a slacker.’ I can remember many times back in the Belfry days when I thought this and it never worked out the way I wanted. Instead of getting a thousand words done, I’d get maybe a hundred, play a few FreeCell games, give up, and spend the rest of the evening in bed reading comic books. So this time out, I figured why go through the same faulty reasoning? I finished early on Friday, got in my jammies, and continued my reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books. (I’m rereading the first five so I can immediately jump into the new one that just dropped a few days ago.) Best decision I ever made.
SO! What this means is that today, Monday, I am not catching up, but picking up where I left off. It’s best that I don’t try to do everything all at once, because That Way Lies Madness. Instead, I just start back in on the work, and go as far as the day takes me. Whether it’s just a partial or multiple chapters doesn’t matter…as long as I’m heading in the right direction.
Seems as though I did in fact learn from my mistakes over the years!
On Writing Transitions
I’m currently at the final quarter of this recent revision go-round for Diwa & Kaffi, which means that hopefully within the next couple of weeks, I’ll be able to get back to my new writing projects again. Yes! I am definitely looking forward to it!
The transition between Writer Brain work (that is, creating new words and ideas from scratch) and Editor Brain work (revision and rewriting words and ideas that already exist) can be tough sometimes, especially when I’ve been doing one or the other for an extended period of time. The transition between the multiyear process of revising, prepping and self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy and the start of a completely new project (in this case, Meet the Lidwells!), took a lot of time for me to get used to.
My original plan after releasing The Balance of Light was actually to write the next book in the Mendaihu Universe, but after several false starts, I realized that what I really wanted to do was try my hand at writing shorter standalone stories. The trilogy books are doorstoppers, I’ll admit, so I wanted to learn how to write econo, to borrow a Minutemen phrase. I tried starting up a few other stories and even untrunking a few older ideas, but none of them stuck. This is why I turned to 750Words.com — I needed to force myself to think about writing something clear and compact instead of sprawling and superheavy on the worldbuilding. It forced me to stop looking at my writing in Big Picture format and start looking at each chapter or scene on its own, as part of a larger project. That kept me from a) feeling overwhelmed by it, and b) taught me to dial it all back a bit…each scene didn’t necessarily need to be cranked up to ten every single time.
And when I finished Lidwells, I immediately started working not one but two standalones — In My Blue World and Diwa & Kaffi — on 750Words, while doing revision work at the end of the day. That’s where I realized that the best way to deal with the Writer/Editor Brains issue was not to hyperfocus on one or the other for extended lengths of time. I could spend some time during the day creating a world and some time during the evening tidying up another one. You can definitely sense it in my books I’ve written so far: the Trilogy is quite intense in numerous places, compared to the lightness of Lidwells and the dreamlike quality of In My Blue World. You can even see it in Diwa & Kaffi (whenever it finally becomes available to you!), which I’ve described as “a small story in a much bigger world”.
There is no one single way to transition between the two brain settings, to be honest…it’s whatever works for the writer themselves. I’ve learned that daily multitasking in microbursts is the best for me. I find fresh word count during the day makes me feel productive, making the evening revision work enjoyable and less like a chore.
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