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Current Projects -- April, 2009

Vacation project: Outline that novel!

I've had the novel sitting on my desktop for, what, six months?, and I've barely touched it. I work on the outline off and on, but I've made some significant character changes that required some plot reworking. I'm pleased with the changes. They add depth and fix some character motivation issues I was having. (There's still one major character motivation problem I haven't been able to fix, but that's an issue for another post.)

So when I finally took a couple of weeks off, I set a goal of getting my novel full outlined. Um... didn't happen. But I worked on it almost every day, and I made very solid progress. I am very happy with what I got done, and I even started working on the actual text. (Imagine that! WRITING the novel!)

I scrapped the beginning I started with last year. I hated what I'd written, but more importantly, it wasn't critical to the story. The new beginning not only introduces key characters and leads into the inciting event for the novel as a whole, but it also sets up two key storylines that come into play later.

The writing itself... is coming slowly. I really want to have a draft finished before the Pacific Northwest Writers Association's annual conference at the end of July. To do that I'd need to average 1000 words a day -- about four pages. Four pages isn't much. I can do that, right? Right now four sentences is overwhelming me. Why is it that when I write nonfiction or fiction that doesn't "matter," the words just fly off my keyboard? Okay, maybe it's not THAT easy then, but it's definitely easier than this. At this rate, I might have a draft finished in three years, not three months!

Friday, April 24, 2009

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