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Spring Writing Update

Can you believe that we're already halfway through April? I'm going to blink and it'll be July, I can tell. The last few months in writing-land have marched along. I'm making progress, but am not quite where I want to be. 

The writing-related goals that I set in January were to have a beta-ready draft of The Wedding Crown done by the end of March (so I could submit to revpit), to have one zero-draft done by this time, work on focusing my time on craft instead of deadlines, and set up a dedicated writing desk. 

I'm on track with my zero-drafts (wrote a 10,600 short in January), and my brain is whirring with an idea for the upcoming drafting week in May. And my writing desk is up and running--someday I'll share pictures of it. 

In hindsight, goal#1 and goal #3 are a little bit at odds with each other. 

I ended up spending all of the Winter Writing Festival (January 15-February 28) getting to the end of draft 3 of The Wedding Crown (81,440 words). About halfway through the draft I realized I wanted to completely change the pacing, and started writing from the end up, which left me with a stack of revision notes for the first half of the book. 

Knowing that I had a lot to revise, I set a new goal of April 15th to finish draft 4, and dove into one of my writing friend's methods for analyzing plot. I spent a week writing each scene onto a notecard, and then the weekend analyzing each scene and making additional notes. At this point in my draft, my character arc is pretty strong, so I was mostly adding in details on side-character arcs. The story is really starting to get exciting, and as I dove into draft 4 it felt like it was taking shape. I've been getting consistently positive feedback from my critique group, and the end seemed in reach...

And then I hit the end of quarter 1, and suddenly I just Could Not Write. I spent a week floundering and trying to push past the scene where I was stuck, but my heart wasn't in it. I decided to hit pause and waved April 15th goodbye. I spent a day wallowing, and then a week writing out my scene-by-scene synopsis. This is where I realized that I had a problem of stakes. I sent the synopsis out to a couple writing friends, and they helped to point out additional areas where the stakes were lacking, and where twists came out of nowhere. I did some more tweaking, and then on April 15th dove back into drafting with the new slightly tweaked but much stronger outline. I'm calling this draft 4.1, since I never made it all the way through 4. 

Hopefully by the end of today I will be back to the end of quarter 1 and will be able to see the way forward!

With this round I'm trying another new method of tracking. For each scene, there are a set number of passes I need to do. I have 10 scenes (that I'm aware of right now) that I need to completely re-draft, and then I need to revise every scene for adherence to the outline (and world-building, stakes, character arcs, and foreshadowing). A third pass is to run everything through my passive-voice macro and do my version of line-edits. In total, there are 140 "things" to do. My goal is to complete 2 percent of the novel each day from now until the end of May--or 3 "things" (either drafting, revising, or editing). I can choose what I do day-to-day based on what mister brain is in the mood for, without holding myself too rigidly to word count. We'll see in June if this method leaves me with a stronger draft, or if I'm just wasting time playing in excel instead of writing!

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