Crash, Burn, and Recovery

Update 10 9-15 August 2021

Ok. This was a great week. I mean I wish I had double the weird count, but overall, it was a great one.

First off, I got in all three writing sessions this week. Yay me, but I barely squeaked by with my weekly word goal.

Last week I posted about how I opened Scrivener and stared at the blank screen and just couldn’t write the damn chapter. I just didn’t feel it. I have more details in the previous post if you’re interested. But anyway, chapter 15 defied me. So, this week I managed to write chapter 15.

Yes… three sessions, over 6000 words, ONE chapter… but I managed it. It’s done for now and I can move on. I also just realized I didn’t talk about how I fixed the problem from last week.

Fixing the Problem

So, I was disgusted with the chapter. Literally FELT like I couldn’t write it. Couldn’t get into it. And it was not a case of subject matter or any of that. It was just I didn’t want to get into the character, or write that scene. I felt nothing about it. Other than revulsion at the thought of taping the keys.

Normally I can get over this by just forcing myself to write. And I did feel better when I wrote last week’s blog. The act of typing usually makes me want to keep writing. But even after finishing the blog, I still didn’t want to write chapter 15… nor did I want to skip ahead and come back later.

So, I pulled out a notebook and a new pen and I started to think about outlining a few more chapters. And suddenly it started to flow. I worked out the pattern of the povs for the end of the book and write titles for every chapter and broke down the arcs of the characters to their “ends.”

I went from having 21 chapters outlined (as seen in my cover photo above) to having 52 chapters and an epilogue outlined. As seen here below.

Word Count

So, armed with a new outline and a full picture of where I’m heading, I sat down and started chapter 15. And I just hammered away at it over three sessions and got the writing done.

I totaled 6362 words total for the week, bringing my manuscript total to 65871 total words.

My chapters have been pretty heavy, word count wise, averaging about 3800 words per. If I can keep it around there or a little less, the novel will be just over 200,000 words. Knowing how I tend to add more and more words per chapter… I’m beginning to think it might be closer 220k. We’ll see how the journey goes. I’m terrible at cutting words when I revise. I usually end up cutting out a thousand only to add another 2000 later.

Podcast

The podcast took a short break. We have plenty of episodes that are forth coming, but we talked it over about a weekly versus bi weekly release schedule.

Episode 6 will be up—hopefully—by Wednesday, and then we should be back on a bi-weekly release schedule. We already have four more episodes in the can and plans for 10 more episodes for the rest of the season.

This week we recorded two episodes back-to-back. And I think we started to get our format all together.

Gaming

This week was only 1 of 2 games.

My Tuesday game went really well. It was a massive RP session with future storylines and implications laid out. We’re also racing against the clock as one of my party members has a curse that is slowly killing them. We’re almost to the end of our time

My Saturday game didn’t happen as this Saturday, the 14^th was Free Comic Book Day! This year was a little more subdued than previous years, what with covid and all that. But it was still a killer day. And more than a 10-hour shift for myself.

This week though I should be in three games! Woot! Besides the normal two games, I should finally have the Curse of Strahd game this week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into character after nine weeks of not playing.

Outro

Well, it’s a short one this week. I’m not 100 percent after the long weekend.