Weekly Check-In

This week is back to ‘normal’ in my world.  Normal being subjective of course.  Last week was a gauntlet of exhaustion and I appreciate everyone around me for their patience and understanding.

I did write last week, but not as much as I would have liked.  I feel like I’m becoming a broken record with that phrase.

This week is kind of a big week as far as writing goes.  Suzan and I made an agreement that we would both submit our stories on the same day (Thursday).  So I’m avoiding counting down the days, hours and minutes until we hit send.  So that means that we have a lot to do to get ready over the next few days. There are synopses and queries to polish, not to mention the manuscripts themselves.  Excuse me while I freak out a little.

Blogging.

I gave myself a pass on blogging last week.  With all the family stuff going on I didn’t have the energy.  This week I’m going to bounce back with the blogging.  Suzan and I are planning to continue our series and I want to start blogging about the documentaries I’m watching and how I think we can use real life events and research to beef up stories and writing and cool stuff like that.

Revising.

Not much has been happening on the revising front, which is a disappointment to me.  That said, July will be all about revising as I have a Revise in Company class coming up.  Also, there’s a workshop deadline of July 15th for a writer’s workshop selection I need to be able to hand in with reasonable confidence as to where the story is going.  I’m slightly worried that the story I use for the workshop will be done and out on submission by the time the workshop comes around, but what can you do?

Plotting.

The Warrior Writer Boot Camp crowd is going to hate me.  I have a killer idea for an Urban Fantasy I want to write.  I’ve slowly been fleshing out the world and things in my head while not allowing myself to really think through the plot.  It was my way of telling myself to not work on it, but it’s not working.  I really want to write it.  So the Urban Fantasy might be what I write next, pushing Little Spirits to the project I write for NaNoWriMo, which would be fine since it will be a shorter book anyways.

Writing.

I’ve been averaging between 1-2,000 words a day.  It’s not as much as I would like, but it is progress.  I think I’ve been spread too thin over the last few months.  July will be less crazy in that regard at least.

Project: I Spy You (formerly known as Booty-Call Bust)
Genre: paranormal romance
Type: short novel
Progress: I’m crossing my fingers that I can write The End on the draft tonight.  It needs work.  It started out as a novella and is now a novel.  The beginning needs a better lead in for it to be a novel.  There needs to be some more subplot, not a lot since the book is almost entirely the two characters and only one POV.  Overall I’m happy with this project.  It’s fun, it’s made me laugh and I got to write spies.

What I read.

I don’t really remember what I read.  That’s bad, isn’t it?

• Magic Slays by Ilona Andrews

Writing for Challenges: Have a Plan

This month I’m going over four things people can do when writing for monthly challenges like NaNoWriMo and Boot Camps.  This week I want to talk about the plan.  It’s a well known fact I’m something of a hybrid.  I need a road map for where my story is going, but I’m not against a little unplanned diversions.

No matter if you’re a plotter or a pantser, having a plan isn’t a bad thing.  The difference is in the amount of detail you’re going to do.  If you start the writing challenge with no idea what to write about, you’ll spend valuable time discovery writing and possibly writing nothing at all waiting for an idea to fall out of the sky and hit you in the head.  So before the month starts, jot down a list of ideas to write about, characters to use.

If you’re a planner, this is going to be detailed.  Go on and make your character profiles before the challenge starts.  Figure out your plot.  Make your maps.  Get this stuff down so you aren’t wasting your valuable writing time!

Pantsers, I’ve never really been one of you, but chances are you start out writing with an idea.  If you do discovery writing, you might want to do that before the challenge starts.

Regardless, if you’re a planner or a pantser, start your writing challenge out with your ducks in a row, a road map in front of you, and a goal in mind.

Are you a plotter or a pantser?  Do you plan your stories or figure it out as you go along?

Weekly Check-In

This last week has been all about high notes.  I knew that this last week was kinda ‘my week’.  I was going to succeed with flying colors, I just hadn’t realized how amazingly I was going to do.  I’m still flying high from my success, but I might be nose diving pretty soon.  *bites finger nails*

Blogging.

I was doing soooo well at blogging ahead of time.  Now, I’m lucky if I have my blogs done a week ahead. *sigh*  I have the topics and place holder posts for future blogs with the idea jotted down in the body of the post, but I have to come back the week or even the night before and write the dang things.  I need to get back into the jive of having the blogs written out way in advance.

I kicked off my Goals series this week, and on Friday talked about the importance of goals.  This coming week I’m going to talk about setting realistic goals and keeping yourself accountable.  Both are easy to talk about, and very difficult to put into practice.  I foresee a lot of self deprecating stories when I sit down to write those blogs…

Revising.

This has been moved to urgent status this week.  As of Tuesday, I’m in a revising and editing class.  Because I decided to take an extra week to finish Casual Love, which I talk about below, I have lost a week of revisions.  I’m diving back into Blood Bound to revise and polish it.  I really love the story, and I think there’s more there to tell.  So I’m writing new scenes, explaining stuff that was crammed into the story too tightly by the word count restriction and beefing up the story.  I hope to take a week to write new scenes and then two weeks to edit and fine tune those scenes before I hand it off to other people for critiques.  Is that a tight schedule?  Yes, but I’m hoping that I can do it in that time because the Savvy Authors May Boot Camp is looming on the horizon and I want to be turning out wordcounts and not pages edited.  If, in the end, I need more editing time I will take it.

I put in a lot of revising and editing on Sunday.  I read through the draft of Blood Bound, made notes of where I thought stuff needed to be added and then set about writing the new introduction.  I was struggling with a way of laying out the world building and introducing some complicated issues without info dumping.  It’s still kinda an info dump, but it’s done in a different, less dumpy way.  I’m tentatively hopeful.

Last year I wrote a paranormal romance called Absolutely, about werewolves.  It’s never going to be publishable.  The idea just isn’t interesting enough, but I’m doing a quick and dirty pass so I can at least share it with my friends and let them read this strange tale.  It’s better than I had anticipated, but not good enough to warrant me doing more with it.  I’m a third of the way through the draft, which is twice as far as I thought I would get today.  I expect it to get more involved as far as cleaning it up from here on out.

Plotting.

I started working my novel idea, Little Spirits, towards being YA.  I’m really loving where the story is going, and even more excited about it than I was to begin with.  The difficulty is that I want to write this for the May Boot Camp, and still take it through the Warrior Writer Boot Camp process.  Those are conflicting goals since honestly they can’t coexist.  You know what I’m going to do anyways?  Proceed with the WWBC process and start the draft May 1st anyways.  It’s not a great idea, since I’m still pretty fuzzy on the plot, but I’m impatient and I know myself.

So my project for the next week is to revamp the protagonist profiles, do quick and dirty profiles for their siblings and parents and the minor characters.  Next Saturday I’m supposed to be doing the main plot points of my story, but I think I’m going to lapse a week and allow the group to have a breather and look over the revamped profiles and the down and dirty synopsis I want to write.

Writing.

Ya ready for this?  Really ready?

Project:Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: novel
Progress: It’s finished! I’m still floating on air.  I’ll come down soon, but I’m still excited and happy and yea!

I also finished a short story! Yea!  I haven’t talked about these short story projects much because I’m leaning heavily towards submitting them to be published under a pen name, for many reasons actually.  These are fun side projects that if I can sell them, I will, but mostly I write them because I want to get an idea out of my head and they’re fun.

What I read.

• Wolf Mates 2-4 by Dakota Cassidy
• The Ex-Files by Dakota Cassidy
• Dark Enchantment by Anya Bast
• Bound by Blood by Cynthia Eden

#ROW80

If you don’t know, I’m participating in the A Round of Words in 80 Days challenge.  I’m being a rebel and doing my weekly updates on Mondays because I’m old and set in my blogging ways.  *brandishes cane*  Actually I rarely post on the weekends so the Sunday check in was out, and I had already promised to blog on topics on Wednesdays so it just made sense to combine it.  Anyways!

How did I do towards my ROW80 goals this week?

• This week, like I said above, I finished Casual Love, which was #1 on my goals.
• I finished a short story.  My goal is to finish two, so I’m halfway to that goal!
• I wrote every day.

Whew! I’m exhausted wading through this, so I have no idea how you made it this far.  If I could give you a dollar just for reading this, I would.  How are you doing this week?  Have you accomplished your goals?

Weekly Update!

I signed up for a writing courses over at Savvy Authors!  One of them focuses on horror, and the other on humor.  This means that between Savvy Authors and Lowcountry I’m going to be taking two classes a month.  It’s a little intimidating, but I’m excited about it!  A lot of the classes are workshop like and you get to work through your project, so it’s going to be a really good chance to work on weaknesses.

Blogging.

Since it’s National Craft Month, I added some crafty blogs to the mix for Thursdays.  Also, I experienced almost doubling of the daily hits.  It’s been exciting to watch everything double.  I don’t know why, but it’s cool.  Strangely, Suzan and I are doing complimentary blogging series.  She’s discussing the finer points of OneNote while I explain how I organize my Novel Notebook in the program.  It’s like we’re a collective or something….

Revising.

I’ve decided that in the interest of finishing this draft, I’m going to work on revising Blood Bound in April.  I think that the revisions shouldn’t bee too difficult, so a month will allow me to get most of it done.  While I haven’t done anymore work on it this week, I have been thinking about it and working some of the lore through in my head.  I’m excited about this project – still – even after all the revisions and the rejection earlier this year.  That’s a good sign, right?

Plotting.

We tabled my material this week for Warrior Writer Boot Camp.  There are several new people who are starting their projects and some other things going on, plus some brand new visitors, so it made sense to just hold off on mine until later.  Realistically, it doesn’t bother me because this month I’m working on my romance.  Next month I’ll be revising.  So I have two months before I need another project to sharpen my nails on.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t been plotting.  I’ve been watching a lot of paranormal investigator shows to get my brain rolling.  I’m bursting with ideas!

Writing.

This week has had a lot more steady writing time.  I’ve been more focused, I’ve written more, and I feel more positive about my writing as a whole.  I think I’ve just let distractions grab my attention too much so I’ll have to work on that going forward.  This weekend was especially productive!  Between Saturday and Sunday I wrote almost 14K, which was awesome!  I haven’t written this much in one sitting for a long time, and it was a relief – a joy – to write like that.

Project: Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: contemporary romance
Type: novel
Progress: I’m beginning to think that my novel started earlier than I really need it to.  I also wish that the hero and heroine had more interaction in the first half of the novel.  I’m thinking towards revisions and what I can alter to make it work out better.  Part of me wants to stop and work on the beginning again, but I don’t think that’s a good move.  I’d spend the rest of the month tweaking what I have and never finishing it.  I’m thinking I should finish the draft and then go back and evaluate it as a whole.  If I still think the same things that I do now, well then it’s time for some heavy revising.  What’s keeping me from going back right now is the idea of crippling the idea before it’s fully fledged.  I can mold it in the revision process, but if it’s only half finished it’ll still only have one leg!

This weekend though has really put me on track.  I reached an emotional high point in the book, the characters achieved something pretty high on the emotional stakes scale and I’m rocking along really well.

What I read…

• Trolls in the Hamptons by C – so freaking cute!
• Grimmspace by Ann Aguirre

Writing Update

I blogged earlier today about writing accountability.  One of the ways I talked about keeping myself accountable was by blogging my process.  Mondays work out as a good day for me to check in because I’ve had the weekend to burrow and write, and Tuesday my fellow writer friends and I meet up at our favorite deli to write alongside each other.

So, without further preamble, here’s what I’ve been up to!

This last week was the great snowpocalypse here in Texas.  You would think that with all of this time spent iced and then snowed in I would have gotten tons of writing done, right?

WRONG!

Most of it was spent working on my work laptops (yes, multiple) and watching the weather or counting down the minutes until the electricity came back on.  But I did get stuff done, to some extent.

Blogging. I wrote most of my topical blog posts for February during this frozen week.  I think I have two or three left which are going up at the very end of the month, so I’m dragging my feet on those.  But all this blogging is good!  I’m talking to you my readers, I’m making myself think objectively about things, and blogging about things like my story binder makes me more likely to fill the whole darn thing out!

Which takes me to the second thing I did tons of this week!

Plotting. If you’ve read my example post on the Springboard, then you know I’m working on a new project.  If you know me at all, you probably know that I’m a planner.  I like a nice, detailed plan of where my plot is going.  Some people find this boring, I find that it helps me to focus on my goal.  I have a tangible destination and I write myself there!  Without that goal, I flounder and my writing lacks and I get frusterated and walk away from projects.  But after this week I have a wonderful, complex plot that I’m excited about.

Writing. I didn’t do as much of this as I would have liked to do this last week, but I did a lot of ground work for my Babylon idea.

Project: Reti Guild
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Type: Novel
Progress: I have the first day written.  This might not sound like a lot, but in this one day the major plot is kicked off, and four different subplots are introduced, as well as most of the major and minor characters.  I did a lot of work on this through the week, and it’s really cool to start writing the actual draft.  Very excited about this project!

Project: Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: Novel
Progress: This is a resurrected story I started last year.  The idea is that there are five friends who have teamed up, won the Battle of the Bulge and are now looking for love.  The first friend I’m writing her story is Dee.  I was thinking about this a lot over the last week when I was weighing the decision to work on this again.  I needed more depth, more stuff going on.  So over the week I’ve made some notes and Sunday I sat down and wrote the new beginning.  There’s a big chunk of it already written, but I’m changing it from first person to third, and swapping up the love interests.  Overall, I’m excited about it, and I see some promise!

Revising. I’m going to not talk about this.  I haven’t done anything worth mentioning this week – and that’s bad.  I’m going to set a daily goal this next week to motivate myself, so hopefully next week I’ll be reporting next week on some better progress.

And that’s my writing update!  I’m going to work on an easier format for these updates, but probably later.  Not right now.