Writing down resolutions and making them public sure is keeping me honest. While spare time is always at a premium with two munchkins, I did manage to update and finalize my book outline as promised in January.
Where did I find the moments?
Capitalizing on T’s bath time while D was sleeping, I first got all my handwritten or Google Doc additions, some dating back to November and NaNoWriMo, into my master Scrivener file for Book 2.
Once everything was generally in place, I used the notecard view to see the colors that indicate character point of view. Doing this really helps to make sure that each character’s story is evenly spaced out. In the original plotting, I’d already determined how many scenes would be told from each character’s point of view. Totally a math exercise from your resident geek.
Then I looked for the place cards I’d left when originally plotting the book. You remember the breakthrough in the plot, so I found places to spread out that story line and tie it to what already existed.
Finally, I reviewed the notecards, added some guidance to help further my subplots and themes or provide some hints about good ideas for dialogue if I had them, and then I read over the whole set a couple of times to see if I liked the flow.
Now comes the fun part of actually doing some writing.
The next three months are dedicated to writing 500 words per day to finish the first draft. This leaves plenty of space to write blog posts and make mistakes, since (another geeky math exercise…)
500 words/day X 90 days = 45,000 words.
The draft is already 59,103 words, although some of the existing text will probably be edited out. I’m targeting about 80,000 words for this book.
Now the moment of truth: how are you guys doing on your New Year’s resolutions?