Update 3 Week 2
Welcome!
Year of the Book update number 3! Week 2 of my classes and progress report and planning.
End of June:
Its already the end of June, half way thru the year, and I’m just finishing the first week of my new classes. To think that from now until January I will be in various Thesis level classes has me excited. I have been dreadful with my motivation. As I am sure many of you have as well.
Besides having issues with depression and generally drifting back and forth between multiple projects at a time, I have often had trouble with keeping myself motivated. When you add in a global pandemic, quarantine, and general social/political upheaval. It is a lot to handle.
I will admit I’m a relatively introverted person and I was laughing about having to stay home and keep to myself. I am far more comfortable sitting in my room writing, reading, hobbying, or just watching lots of awful movies.
Change it up
But I don’t want to get us depressed or thinking of the shitty times we find ourselves in. This post is about accountability. About motivation and keeping me on the right path. It is where I report my word counts and talk about story, classes, and revision. This is where I hope to start a conversation with other writers and talk about process, about Scrivener versus Word, about productivity helpers.
It’s where I want to talk about fantasy, adventure, and having way too many characters and realizing that many of them are just names on nebulous people. (More on that in a bit).
But even if I don’t get any comments or start talking. I am still putting this out there in the hope of motivating others and maybe offering insight to the process. I already mentioned that I want to take you all through my thesis classes. I also intend to take you past my classes. Take you on my hunt for an agent, take you all along as I try to sell the manuscript and even through the process of edits, building up for release, etc. Of course, by then I will probably only do posts once a month or bi-weekly. I have been prepared for the publication of a book to take a LONG time.
Let’s get to the point, why you’re really here.
Last Week’s Word count
Once again, I only wrote three days. (Yes, I am a little mad that I had time on two other days and I didn’t use it). I eked out 5996 words over those 3 sessions, with the best day putting out 3806 and the weakest day putting out 485.
In my defense, those 485 words were on Monday, which was also the day I wrote all of my intros, discussion posts, and other such for school. Monday is a VERY busy day for me.
This has brought my WIP to a total of 41,449 and I’m projecting at least 150,000 final words.
Story Progress
The bulk of this writing was chapter 9 and what I consider to be the end of the first Act.
I haven’t talked much about the format and details of the novel. This is an experiment in POV for me. Normally I would break down each chapter as a location and I would scene shift through all of the POVs in the book. Meaning I would have large chapters jumping around the different lanes of the story.
But with this novel I decided to have each chapter focus on a single POV and I cycle through 5 strict povs for the entire novel. With an extra POV only for the prologue (and possibly for the epilogue).
ACT 1:
I consider Act 1 to be the place to introduce each of the characters (POVs) and their various supporting casts. Also get their conflicts, interests, and issues “out in the air” (not literally in all cases, many of my characters refuse to talk about their problems and thus a lot of the conflict is internal and also compounded by the lack of communication).
Now, my novel starts out pretending it is something its not… that’s a weird statement and I’ll try to explain. But the novel pretends to be an old school action adventure type story… an Allan Quarterman and the Lost City of Gold-type of thing. Our heroes have come to a new land and are seeking to head out across a vast desert to find a “Lost City,” that may or may not have gold in it.
The various POVs just happen to arrive in this land around the same time and realize that they are each looking for the same thing. Basically, we have 5 “Allan Quartermans.” The end of Act 1 sees them all diving into the desert along their various paths, racing against each other.
I said “PRETENDING”
Yes, the book is messing with the characters (and I guess the readers, except the readers will have the back blurb to tell them this is NOT about a race). Once into the desert, the titular Ashlands, our “heroes” discover a lot more horror, mystery, and some hard truths about reality/religion and themselves.
The book is an Epic DARK Fantasy (or Sword and Sorcery, depending on how pedantic you are). I do like to torture my characters.
Week 2 of Classes and Writing Goals:
This week is my first final! Yeah, I know that’s awfully quick but I actually asked for this date. I have to turn in the first 10-15K of my writing. Matter of fact, I will be spending the rest of today doing some quick revision on those words and then writing chapter 10.
I also have another, non- thesis class and have to do posts in there and engage those students. Meaning my time is split right now. But the week should be pretty light, and considering it ends with a July 4th weekend, that’s a good thing.
My weekly goal is still a minimum of 3000 words and I think that should be easy to hit. Chapter 10 and the next few are favorites of mine! At least in the planning and outlining stages. My novel has a bit of a steampunk/magic feel to it as the world has progressed from medieval to more industrial. A weird mix of 15th and 18th century.
Chapter 10 and a Train:
The very first prototype train exists in my book. And several of the POV characters have gotten the idea that they will use this train to get a jump on the race. Course, it doesn’t help when all but one of the POVs get on the same train, at the same time. Also, it only goes back and forth between two points. Sigh. [that sigh is the characters in the scene].
Because I introduced a train, a desert, and some upset pov characters… I feel it has to only escalate from bad to worse. It might be cliché but I am going to rob and derail that train. The entire event is going to bounce between 4 povs, so it should be a series of rapid fire chapters that show a lot of the same events from different angles.
Thanks!
Seriously, the handful of you who come in here and check this out makes me feel great. And knowing that a select few of you keep coming back makes me feel it necessary not to fail you. It really helps me get motivated to keep producing numbers.
I have to say, this MFA Program is probably one of the best things I’ve done with my life.
