Words Must Flow

New Novel Week 2 10-16 May

Hello dear readers.

This week was great. Mostly. I have fallen into a rhythm with my writing where I can easily hit my base goals. Though I will admit that I’m only writing 3 days a week. I feel like I could step up and write more. But things are working out right now.

I’m trying not to overwork or push myself too hard. I have a whole list of other things I need to start addressing. Things I have neglected. But let’s tackle each of the parts of the week.

Word Goals

So, I don’t have a deadline for the novel but I do have session goals and weekly goals.

I try to write 2000 words every session, and thus want to hit about 5-6000 words per week. With the novel aimed at hitting 200K. That would give me about 40 weeks to finish the novel…. Now that I just wrote all of that out, I realize that I need to up my goals. That is far to slow a pace for what I’m trying to accomplish.

Luckily I’m hitting well over 2000 words per session.

This week I managed 7605 words, bringing the novel to 12,247.

Revision Plans

I know we didn’t segue to this. I did that for a reason.

I was always the type who would try and go back and revise the previous work before starting new work. And doing it this way I wouldn’t finish anything. The last few years I have been pushing myself to write the whole novel in one go.

I had no issues with writing my thesis this way. Now, perhaps it was due to the fact that I had a hard deadline for finishing that book. I had to get it done for my classes and I could not stop for anything. I was a writing machine, often hitting over 10k per week towards the end.

Now, I have no hard deadline. I’m just writing this novel for me.

I am second guessing everything.

Last Week, I talked about prologues and why I was putting two of them in my novel. Ha ha. I was so caught up in the structure of my novel, in the layout of the entire series that I didn’t think about the narrative and the reader having to wade through the beginning of my book.

Reading Exchange

Matters are further stressed because on this novel I have a writer’s exchange worked out. Wherein each week myself and another writer exchange the previous week’s work and then workshop it.

Every problem with my prologues was outlined and laid bare and I realized that I was clinging to formatting. I don’t know what it is about odd structures to books but I have always been drawn to them. The story within a story, the epistolary story, frame within a frame, etc.

Suffice. I have now started to have all these ideas for how to rewrite and cut the prologue and my first chapters. But I don’t want to stop my forward progress. Dilemmas.

I know that if I ignore my ideas now, I will not retain them in the future. So now I need to start a notebook wherein I write down all of my changes… but even that might not be good enough. If this book is going to take me the rest of the year to complete, then I need to work in revision now.

The Story so Far…

Let’s move away from those thoughts. I don’t want to overwhelm myself with second thoughts and misgivings.

This novel is beginning much like my thesis novel, in that I’m using the same narrative style. I mentioned in a post… probably 30 updates back, that I normally write each chapter in a single location and jump through POVs. But my previous novel was an experiment in writing each chapter from a single POV, and each chapter was a different POV.

I’m doing that again for this novel. It’s starting to become very comfortable for me, even though it does tend to fall apart on me at the end of the novel. In The Ashlands, all of the POVs ended up coming together in the same place at the same time for the end of the novel.

I ended up writing 10 very short chapters that all over lapped and showed the same scenes from different views. I’m still waiting for feedback from my beta reader on that. I don’t know if it works well, or if its annoying to reread some of the same segments from a different angle.

That problem should not happen in this book. As most of the POVs only cross at a few key points and several of the storylines are happening wholly apart from one another. Without the principal characters realizing that they are affecting each other at all.

This week

So, yesterday I got my second vaccine shot, and will admit that while I write this I am sore and feeling run down. I’m worried that I might not make my novel goals today… as I also have other writing that needs doing. I have been putting off my query letters for months. If I want to make a living as a writer, I need to actually sell the novels.

I also have side work painting, and I need the money now. Everything is trying to make sure that this week does not start off with a lot of writing. But I will find a way to work hard.

I’m also trying to place a personal essay. Last week saw me get two rejections on it, plus I had a list of four other places to try. 1 my essay was too long. On another it was not quite a good fit, and the other two are journals that want me to pay for submission. Personally, I don’t believe in paying for submitting stories. I’m trying to build my name for sure, but I also need to keep money flowing in, not out.

Podcast

Did I mention that I’ve been working on a podcast for the last month?

We’re not going live yet. We’re still building up a backlog of material and working on segments, theme song, and a few other elements. When it does go live, I will of course let you all know. So far, we have plans to work with another channel and post the first few pods on their YouTube and website as we try to help them and ourselves at the same time.

The podcast has almost nothing to do with writing. It is mostly on Wargaming, Role-Playing, and Hobby… with an emphasis on the Hobby.

Outro…

OK…

Just wrote 1200 words here, so I need to get to my write session for the day.

A lot of you seem to love my Strahd journal, so thank you for that. And these posts have started seeing a rise in readership, so thank you all for that as well.

I know they just ramble a bit, but I enjoy sharing my struggle with the rest of you.