New Plan

Same as the old plan. But better.

My father is an engineer and has an MBA. I, conversely, as a child was a royal hellion...no, not in the cool burn things down at random breaking things kind of way, but more of a supreme dork attention getting nerd's nerd kind of way. Perhaps Essence of Dork is a better way of putting it....

But my father kept trying to come up with systems to solve the problem. Most of them never really worked. Some did, and those stuck in my mind. I learned two lessons...plans can be useful but you have to stick to them over time. And I also learned that too many plans can be worse than no plans at all.

But since I'm the one making the plan for myself, I know that I worked better in an organized environment, but that my plans have to have enough flexibility to meet the real world, and be something I'm actually willing to do. Setting specific time windows for myself to do something tends to work really well...such as mentally preparing to sit down and write 1000 words a day from September 8th through Jan 8th until I have 120000 words is pretty easy. At least for me. I know because I've written before, I've set quotes for myself before and it works.

Conversely, saying "I'm going to write a story a week" is a lot harder, because the only real audience I have is either editors who often reject it, or a writing group who meets once a month whose capacity of which I can far exceed. The other primary difference is that I plan to write at least seven novels before I 'give up' and self publish (which isn't necessarily giving up anyway) whereas with the short stories I already reached my goal of 25 stories a while ago, so coming up with new ones takes an angle. For me, it takes a tangible, enjoyable accomplishment that's independent of the writing itself.

Its just what I have to do to make myself write.

But coming up with a plan to do something I've never done before isn't quite as easy, so the lesson I've learned is start vague and get more specific. I've never architected a novel before. I've made meta settings before, lots of them, but my novels were really chiseled out of stone rather than built one step at a time, but I really want to try and do it this way.

So, here is the new new new revised schedule.

July 11th - Finish historical world maps.
July 14th - Create map of Glashause
July 17th - Finish historical map of Glashause
July 20th - Create written profiles for the Giant, the Girl, the Poison, Protagonist X and Y, as well as Antagonist X....(I'm looking at this and thinking I may already be too complicated again.)
July 24th - Finish character profiles.
July 27th - Write basic plot Arc.
July 31rst - Finish plot Arc with one or two sentence summaries for each chapter.

I don't even know what I'll spend August doing, but I'll track progress here even if I don't yet fill in the details.

Chapter 32 of the Pre cyber novel is complete. Chapter 33 will be finished by or on Sunday.