Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Crossed the 10,000 word mark!

I'm at a total of 10,531 words. I did some late night writing and I wrote another 1,456 words. definitely proud of myself. I crossed the 10,000 word mark! a novel being a minimum of 50,000 words it's a big achievement. My goal is to get over 60,000 words as this is a fantasy novel, but that doesn't make my achievement any smaller.
I'm about 1/6 of the way done this novel. I achieved over half of that today alone.If I manage the same next week and the week after I'll cross the 20,000 mark in no time. I may even cross it by the end of next week. But as my writing isn't a steady flow I'm not going to add more pressure on myself. I might not be able to write at all next week, I might write over 10,000 words in a day (that would take a lot of time in one day).
I'm celebrating my accomplishment by sharing it with all of you.

Today's Success

I finished chapter two and chapter three today. It was a total of 4,197 words written today, with a grand total of 9,073 words in the book so far. I'm hoping I can have as much success tomorrow as I did today. Definitely made some good progress both on the story and on my characters. I'm building up the plot and the character relationships. Nothing irritates me more than a relationship that springs out of nowhere in a book, so I'm hinting ahead of time. This way my readers hopefully won't be surprised when I pair two of my characters up together. Lining things up for another character, need readers to know him now as he will be playing an important roll in the following books.
I don't know how long this book will take to write, my last one took a year (and isn't edited yet) so I'm not sure what this one's timeline will be. Super excited with managing over 4,000 words in one day when I also had classes.

Changes caused by Covid19

I'm trying to use the extra time available to write. Hence the short story yesterday, and updating on what I'm writing. I still have school through online classes so unfortunately I can't just write whenever. I did more writing today, along with some plot organization.

I'm not what you'd call a "Gardener" writer. I'm an "Architect" writer, which means I like to have things planned out and laid out. A "Gardener" writer just starts writing. Both ways are effective, it just depends on what works for you. I prefer to have everything planned out. (The terms "Gardener" and "Architect" writer are from Brandon Sanderson).

My life is a little chaotic due to everything being shut down. My way to get myself out of the house and keep from going stir-crazy was by going to school. So I have more time to write, but I'm more restless. It makes for an interesting combination.

I'm only on chapter two in my writing, but I have my plot points laid out till chapter nine. Each chapter is at least 2,500 words. We'll see what my word count ends up being when I get to chapter twenty (the minimum required with the word count). I'll try to keep you all updated on my progress.

Current word count: 5,358

Monday, March 30, 2020

Story Update

I had to set aside the project I was writing, as I didn't have enough information for the beginning section of the book. Since setting it aside I've started a new one, and am almost finished the second chapter. Hoping to move on to chapter three today or tomorrow, and be at chapter four or five by next week.
This story is a paranormal fantasy, which means vampires, witches, werewolves etc. I've got a total of eight races (including humans) with six lesser races. Currently they believe there are only six and six, but the history of the missing two disappeared after the races died out. Two of the six are from the two races that died. It's an interesting concept to play with.
It's been a while since I posted, but I've been doing more writing and recently started writing short stories. I entered a contest and will find out next week if I won (prize is $50).


Friday, March 6, 2020

Writing with a formula

You can come up with a great idea, fantastic characters, and awesome world creation, yet never complete as much as the first draft. This was the problem I have had for years. I'd have a beautiful world, fun characters, but never make it through the first draft. Then a friend of mine shared a post written by a published author. In it the author said that she kept the area she was writing in the same (something that felt calm but creative), she tried to write around the same time every day, and she would always write at least 1,000 words a sitting. She explained that if you could sit and write 1,000 words a day you could finish a first draft in about two months.
After reading the post I looked up the word count required for a novel. 50,000 for fiction, 60,000 for fantasy (with fantasy reaching up to 150,000 words). I set my goal for 50,000 even though I was writing fantasy. I looked up chapter length next. The average chapter length ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 words. Less than that and it's generally deemed too short, more than that and it's deemed too long.
Armed with this knowledge I knew that if all my chapters were the minimum length I'd have 20 chapters. I now had an actual substantial goal. I did not however, plan to write 1,000 words a day. So while I generally wrote over 1,000 words a sitting (sometimes 3,000 or more) I also spent some time organizing my plot summary into plot points, and those plot points into designated chapters. As I was also in school there were some weeks I was unable to do any writing due to my homework load. Still I managed to complete the first draft in under a year (this includes spending time to draw a map; create a character list of over 60 character; give all those characters ranks, families, hometowns, last names, and political alliances). My first draft finished at over 60,000 words, it is now around 70,000 words. As I am in the editing stage I'm waiting to hear back on what I need to correct.
So I've started on a new book, I'm currently over 7,000 words and I started just this week. I will be working on this new book while I wait and hopefully giving updates on both this new book and the one I finished just last December. I'm still in school so there will be weeks where I'm not able to write anything. Still trying to figure out what kind of layout I want for my map. I've started my character list with over 100 characters, many of whom are not assigned to anything. I've only got a handful of them assigned right now, but it works better if I've got a list to draw from.