Surprisingly Good

I know I skipped February. I'm sorry. But I hadn't done any writing, so I had nothing to report. Instead, I was putting off writing in favor of a somewhat time-sensitive sewing project. And I was putting that off in favor of watching Netflix. But I finished the shows I wanted to watch. And then I made a skirt. So now I have nothing left to stop me from writing.

Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in April. I have no idea what I'm going to do for it. Might write a short story. Might revise my vampire novel. So in preparation for the second possibility, I've started rereading the latest draft of Cold Blooded.

2022 Goals

I haven't done much writing thus far in 2022, and so haven't had much to blog about. So I thought that today I would instead look ahead, and talk about what I'm hoping to do this year.

Revisions
As you're surely aware by now, I have a lot of first drafts lying around. They're never going to go anywhere if I don't polish them up. I have a couple in mind to work on.

• Cold Blooded: An urban fantasy novel about vampires, murder, and ice cream. Its recently written second draft changed some major plot points to move it closer to where it needs to be.
• The House at the Top of the Rock: A horror short story (that might expand into a novella) about a ship's small crew, betrayal, and the dark secrets of a seemingly abandoned island.

Post-NaNo 2021

I have meant to write this post since the beginning of December, but kept getting distracted by, you know, things. This is just one of three or four projects I've just not done this month. So don't feel special. I'm neglecting everything equally.

So.

Let's talk about my NaNoWriMo novel, the rewriting of Cold Blooded.

In the end, it was not 50,000 words. It clocked in at 36,153. Which might not seem like a lot, but of the past five years, when I have not reached 50K, this one has the most words. Fun Fact: The last time I did reach 50K was 2016, with the first version of Cold Blooded.

Despite knowing there was very little chance of actually reaching 50K in such a short amount of time, I still went all out on the last day and managed to write 5,450 words on November 30th. If I could just write that many every day, I'd be set. At that point, my goal was less to hit the word count goal, and more to just get to the end of the story. So I wrote the entire Third Act in one day. Which, yes, means Act Three (which should be a quarter of the book) is only 5K words long. But that's fine. It's a rough draft.

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Now, stats. You know how much I love stats.

Ideas and Index Cards

Here I am, skipping whole months again. I took a bit of a break from writing. I didn't even do Camp NaNoWriMo in July.

But what I did do, was buy a corkboard.

Beginning at the End

Sorry, I completely skipped May. I thought I'd done a blog post more recently, and apparently I was wrong. I hadn't had much to say because I wasn't making any progress on the novel.

Until now.

So, I've figured out the climax of the story. I had this vague idea about it, but I didn't know where it was, or how the characters got there, or how they got out once it was over. But I've got it now. And to be honest, it was kind of obvious. Maybe it's cliched, but we're going with it anyway. It's much better than nothing.

See, I've been trying to outline this book from the beginning. I have most of Act 1 (the first quarter) plotted out, and the beginning of Act 2. Then it's just the major plot points with a lot of empty space around them.

In Between the Murders

Here we are at the tail end of Camp NaNo: April Edition. I took a nice break from my vampire novel and wrote something completely different. I set myself a nice, easy little goal of 2,000 words, just to get me writing, not to stress me out. I ended up with over 4,000 words. A tiny victory.

It was just a little half-baked story about time travel, but it did make me realize something important. I had the basic setup in place, and I had an idea for something that would happen, you know, later. Like, there would be other things, and I would build character relationships naturally over the course of these things. And then when I got to the later thing, it would be more… not just sensical, but more satisfying. Like we earned it. But I got bored and skipped over all the in-between things, and then the big scene was just lacking in… stuff.

More Stuff Here

My post-it note outline for Cold Blooded is going pretty well. I've been having ideas, filling in blanks, figuring shit out. It's also making me a bit nervous.

There are points at which Des' new human friends find out what he is (a vampire, if you're just joining us). The first (friend A) was a few scenes before the midpoint, and the second (friend B) was at the midpoint. I moved friend A's discovery a little later, to the midpoint. Then what about friend B? Oh, I moved that a quarter of the book earlier to the First Plot Point.

And this concerns me. Like this plot is a precarious Jenga tower and if I move the wrong piece, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. I had briefly considered Friend B not finding out at all, and now I pull this shit? What am I doing?

When Inciting Is Not Exciting

I'm starting to wonder about my inciting incident. Is it the thing I think it is?

I've seen many times that in a murder mystery, the Inciting Incident is when someone dies, or the body is discovered. So that's where I had it.

And then the First Plot Point is when the main character is irreversibly pulled into the adventure.

The thing is, my first murder doesn't really… affect anything? It happens "off screen" and the main characters hear about it via a news alert. It creates a bit of atmospheric tension (just the tiniest bit), and fewer people are going out and buying ice cream.

And then my First Plot Point was where the main character ends up getting involved. He gets in a direct confrontation with this serial killer. And then he discovers a body. Now things are starting to happen. I think. That's where I left off.

Purposeful Wandering

When I started my revision adventure, I made a list of all the scenes in Cold Blooded. Then I went through and marked all the ones the were important, and the ones that weren't. Scenes that needed to stay vs scenes that needed to be cut.

A lot of the scenes at the beginning that were marked for deletion involved main character Des just… wandering around. Like, he'd walk around town, or around the college campus, and he'd run into people and have awkward conversations and leave. Nothing really important was happening, so I declared that we needed to skip all that.

And because of that, my beginning is very sparse at the moment, as I have yet to figure out what else should go there to fill out the world and the characters and the plot.

Then I had a sudden realization the other day. The wandering was not for nothing. It was important. Des goes wandering around town and around campus because he's looking for a connection. Not that he'd know what to do with it if he found it. Like a dog chasing a car. He wants to go out and be a person and make friends. But when he actually encounters people, the reality that he's a weirdo vampire coming off of a period of near-total isolation comes crashing down and he has to make his exit.

Making Friends

Revision, or rather, rewriting of Cold Blooded continues. Yeah, this is what I'm going to be talking about all the time for the foreseeable future, so buckle up, buttercup.

A new hurdle has presented itself, in that I need to know how to make friends. That is, I need to characters to become friends within the next, say, 20,000 words. Which, now that I say it, is a lot of words, and I should be fine. But there's still the how. I can't make friends in real life, how am I supposed to make them in fiction? Basically, Des, my main character, has recently met another character, and they need to reach a certain level of trust by the Midpoint.

But, like I said, I have about 20,000 words to get there. So let's focus on the here and now. I'm currently writing a scene in which the ice cream shop is featured on an episode of some show on an ersatz Food Network. To be honest, I don't know if this part is going to make it to the final cut, but I'm going to act like it is until that decision is made.

Pulling the World Back Together

Sometimes I reread my old stories. Even riddled with plot holes and bogged down with self-indulgent nonsense, they're not half bad.

Today, I read a short story (10,000 words) that I wrote for Camp NaNo back in 2016. It was a vaguely steampunk world that had been shattered into separate continents that drifted through… space? The science wasn't really a high priority. Anyway, the landmasses were reconnected via cable-car sort of systems that spanned thousands of miles, and the story follows a small town sheriff on the last continent to be connected to the others. He has to deal with the influx of tourists and troublemakers and all that kind of thing.

And it was really good and I never wrote an ending.

Going to the Mountain

Where have I been? Not writing, unfortunately. Mostly just watching Fringe.

Here was my plan. Spend all of 2019 getting Cold Blooded smooshed into something that people could actually read, and then spend 2020 trying to find people to read it.

But here we are. It's mid-August and I have very little to show for it.

I very much want to write this book. Or rather, I want to have written it. But I just don't seem to have the motivation or the discipline to do it.

I know I need to sit down every day and write. I know it. But what do I do? Play games on my phone and watch TV. Just passively absorb entertainment rather than actively creating something.

And why? Why, when I want to write this book, do I sabotage myself instead?

I'm Pushing an Elephant Up the Stairs

I'm back. And post Camp NaNo, too.

Initially, I had set a 10,000 word goal for the month. It seemed reasonable, a nice chunk of words to get Draft Two started.

But I got busy, and just… unmotivated, so I dropped the goal down to 5,000. Which I succeeded at writing. Not as nice of a chunk, but words are words.

And it was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I thought that with my Draft One experience, and my handy new outline, the words would just flow and form a bigger, better version of the story. Not so. My 5,000 words were an exhausting slog through exposition and world building. You know, the boring shit I hate. I skipped a big chunk and didn't even introduce one character when I was supposed to because describing how the ice cream shop was set up was the most tedious piece of drivel I have ever attempted. There has to be a better way.

Falling Much Further Behind

I've had some sequel ideas lately, which might not seem super helpful right now, but it's actually helping me figure out how things should happen now, so they can happen a certain way later.

The downside of looking ahead is that I'm realizing just how many words I need to write and it's looking more and more impossible. To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with…

Assuming a finished length of 80,000 words, which is basically the low end of acceptable, that means a major structural beat occurs roughly every 10,000 words. So the first beat, The Inciting Incident, where shit starts to get weird after all the "normal world" set up, happens 10,000 words in.

I'm Writing a Book, I Swear

With the holiday and all, I kind of forgot I was supposed to write a post. So, sorry it's late.

I have commenced with the rewrite of Cold Blooded. I've been changing things from the first draft, right from the get-go. So some of the same things happen, but they happen differently. I think it's better?

Right now I'm in the midst of The Setup, the piece of world-building that occupies the first 11% or so, where we meet our main character and the normal world he lives in. And then we're going to shake it up when we get to the Inciting Incident at the 12% mark. But first we have to get there.

And my god, is it boring. I don't like how it's going. I don't like how I'm writing it. I kind of hate it. It's not fun and wacky and exciting like this story tends to be. It's just bullshit exposition. Here's a ice cream shop. Here's how it works. Here's some weird flavors.

Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.

Breaking Through

That's right, I'm still alive. I told you I'd be back in April sometime.

I really haven't gone anywhere, there's just been a lot going on. Not a lot of time or brain power for creative pursuits.

I did manage to set a goal for Camp NaNo of 5,000 (a meager amount, but whatever), and I've just finished with 5,028. So, I've accomplished something. I wound up with two short stories revolving around portals to a sort of shadow dimension. I watched Stranger Things finally, and it's infiltrated my brain.

But the real goal was to get my mind off of my vampire novel, in the hopes that ideas for it would come when I wasn't trying. So there I was, last night, 40 words short of my 5,000 word goal, and I find myself working on my novel outline.  The distraction seems to have done the trick.

I still have all these subplots I'm not sure what to do with, and random scenes I'd like to incorporate, so I'm not in the home stretch by any means. 

Organizational Challenges

Where have I been? Well, that's a valid question.

I've been mucking about with this revision of Cold Blooded for… quite some time, with very little progress. Well, little visible progress.

I have a plot outline… outline. Or a template or whatever. I got it from Helping Writers Become Authors. It has all the plot points and everything, and where each major event is supposed to happen. Okay. Super. I have some of my plot points, from my rough draft, stuck in there, where they feel like they should logically go.

But then I have all these other things, and I have no idea where they fit. 

The Great Scene Excision of 2019

This is what I'm looking at right now.

 

It's every scene in Cold Blooded, or rather, in the rough draft NaNo abomination that is going to become Cold Blooded. I took my list of scenes, and starting putting notes on them, determining the fate of that scene. Then I color coded them, because colors are pretty.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Step One is complete. I have broken the rough draft into 41 scenes, or scene-like entities. Technically, "Scene" 41 is just all the extra nonsense at the end, but I've been putting in section breaks at each scene change, so I can jump straight there, so Scene 41 is just where I would go if I want any of that.

So I have 40 scenes, really. Some are long, some are short. Some are probably several scenes crammed together, while others are just random events. But they're all broken up and catalogued. Now comes the tricky part: Figuring out what to keep and where to put it.