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.

A peice of advice

Do not accidentally use the same email twice on a carefully crafted query letter to an agent when you are selling your book. I submitted "Micronation" to five agents today, but accidentally sent one agent's email to another. That probably won't go over very well. :/

Should finish with Chapter 32 of the precyber novel tonight.

We had the writing group meeting this last Saturday. Rita and Julie's stories were quite interesting but in the interest of confidentiality, I'm not going to mention much detail. Julie is very good at writing texture and characterization and Rita is very good at detail and narration. I managed to finish Air, but in retrospect I'm not so sure that I'm going to use it as an independent story.

But it was very helpful in drilling down the details on the elves for the Fantasy novel.

Status

Some preparations in writing the novel but it is slow. There is a very good chance I may have to go pell mell into this thing just like I have most every other novel I've written....and if that's the case I can't see how I'll ever be that good. All of the REALLY good writers take notes and do things meticulously.

But it is better to write it than not to write it. :/

Still haven't finished air yet but I will have to by Saturday. Do or die as it were.

I've written another poem for the pod cast, 4 pages or so called "The Witch Queen." I may like another title for it. I'll have to think on it.

Precyber is at Chapter 30 and the goal is to be at Chapter 32 by Sunday.

Finally

I've finally finally started on notes for the novel. Its been pretty slow going, and I think part of it was that typing it all in here just wasn't working for me, so I've been working on the notes by hand in the early morning. So far, I have a rough map of the second age, and I'm going to keep working on that until I have the big map and then make Glashause, where most of the novel will take place.

I'm also starting with the basics of the plot, and so far I have four threads which will require a bit more definition, but its a start. I hope to get an outline done, because one way or another, come Tuesday the 8th of September I keep going at 1000 words a day for 120 days non stop until I have a novel...or at least the first chunk of one.

Precyber is at Chapter 30 at this point, but I have a lot of edits I have to turn into Ken.

Thinking about starting two more poems, but I haven't decided what they should be at this point. We'll see.

Decision

I've been going back and forth for the last month about whether or not I still wanted to do the fantasy novel in September or something else. There was a strong desire in my mind for a plan in which I basically finished the twelve stories and then and only then did the fantasy novel, but its not working out that way. The stories are taking too long, and as interesting as the setting is so far, I'm thinking the only way to make this work is to just leap in and do it.

So starting every morning for the next three months until Dragoncon, my goal is to type in something more about the world and the plot in hopes of getting things laid out as much as possible before I start. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I'm still writing the 12 stories, finishing with Air.

I finished chapter 29 of the Precyber novel, and hope to finish Chapter 30 this week. Ken and I have a goal to finish it by the end of the year.

Writing

Very little accomplished. I hope to finish Chapter 29 of Precyber and Noir Femme Fetal tonight.

I'll also probably do 400-500 words for Air.

More thoughts tomorrow.

This week

Got 3000 words of air done for the Writer's group tonight, hope to write 1500 more before we meet and finish the story.

3 out of the 4 poems are done, but only two of the four initial actors are responding, though fortunately I've been pinged by a few others who might be able to replace them.