Nov 1, 2024
Today has been a bit rushed, but I managed to find the time to sit down and do some editing. Maybe not as much as I would have liked, but I hit my target and got six minutes ahead.
I have never really loved the process of editing a story. I love planning stories and I love writing the first draft, but going back over it to look for spelling mistakes and things has always been a bit of a struggle. That’s why I have so many stories that only exist as a first draft. But I need to do it before I can start publishing them.
As you can see below, there is a new section to my daily roundup of work done. I am aiming to average 20 minutes of editing every day. I got a decent chunk done on Sisterhood, but don’t know how long it will take before that is actually published. Once the editing is done I still need to make a cover, format the book, and put it up for sale.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 17
Production
Words written today: 1,049
Words written total: 35,991
Plus / Minus target: +2,991
Currently writing: The Lottery
Post-Production
Minutes today: 26
Minutes total: 26
Plus / Minus target: +6
Currently publishing: Sisterhood
Oct 28, 2024
Most people probably wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I suffer from an all or nothing personality. No idea where I got it from, but it’s mine to deal with.
It comes out at times like when I try to improve my relationship with the internet. A sensible approach would be to reduce the amount of time I spend online, but I find myself jumping straight to not using the internet at all.
And it snowballs. I go from not using the internet at all to trying to reduce all my technology useage, until I’m ready to sell my phone and computer and go and live off the land.
This writing challenge is a good example of me trying to do the opposite of that. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I realised it.
The first writing challenge I set out to do was a million words in a year. Which I failed. To be fair, I got something like 800,000 so I failed well, but even if I’d managed it, I couldn’t have sustained it. This time things are different. 1,000 words a day is a goal I can hit pretty much every day. It’s not an impressive number, but it’s something I can do consistently. And that’s what I’m looking for.
The same is true for the planning (one story plan a day) and the editing I’m going to be starting on Friday. And now that I’ve realised it, I’m looking at other areas of my life where I can apply this simple goal of being a bit better.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 13
Production
Words written today: 1,048
Words written total: 31,787
Plus / Minus target: +2,787
Currently writing: Son of Mars
Oct 27, 2024
I don’t know for sure that Son of Mars isn’t going to work. Like I’ve said before; when I’m in the middle of writing something, I’m the worst judge of whether it’s any good. I might get to the editing stage and find out I really like the story and that it (whisper it) might even be good. But it also might not be.
I’ve been thinking about that a bit recently and trying to work out what to do. I am successfully overcoming my desire to stop writing a story because I don’t think it’s good (while I’m writing it), but there’s still the chance that I don’t think it’s good after I’ve edited it. Do I still go ahead and publish that story?
I don’t know the answer to that at the moment. I know Dean Wesley Smith would say that I should publish it and let readers decide, and maybe that’s what I’ll do. It’s probably what I should do.
Even if I do publish it, there is still a chance that it won’t be any good. That it doesn’t really work. I’m still (re-)finding my feet with this writing and publishing thing, so I’m not going to pretent that everything I write will be solid gold. But then not everything I published before was either. I’m happy to admit that some of the stuff I wrote and published isn’t any good, but maybe what I think is no good, and what you think is no good, aren’t the same.
I’m just thinking through this. I don’t have an answer. At the moment, it’s making it easier to finish a story if I tell myself I don’t have to publish it, and that’s half the challenge I’ve got going here. Maybe by the time I get to the editing and publishing stage, I won’t feel so connected to the thing and can put it out.
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Writing went well this morning and it’s feeling more natural to put together a story plan. On Friday I will be starting the editing / post-production part of the challenge and, as you can probably tell from the post above, I’m a bit anxious about that.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 12
Production
Words written today: 1,057
Words written total: 30,739
Plus / Minus target: +2,739
Currently writing: Son of Mars
Oct 20, 2024
I now have five stories planned, one of which I am currently writing, all of which I like. It might be hard to pick between them when the time comes. That’s not a complaint though, it’s what I wanted when I started this habit.
The idea process is straight forward. I have a little template in Obsidian that looks like this:
IDEA:
A CHARACTER:
THE CHARACTER WANTS SOMETHING:
BUT SOMETHING PREVENTS THEM FROM GETTING WHAT THEY WANT EASILY:
SO THEY STRUGGLE AGAINST THE FORCE:
AND EITHER SUCCEED OR FAIL:
SETUP:
MOVE INTO ACTION:
THE PROMISE IN THE PREMISE:
SHIT GETS REAL:
FINALE:
I start with a vague description and then I work through each step. The last part (SETUP to FINALE) is the actual plan. Usually I go through it in order, but this morning the ending was the clearest image in my mind, so I started there.
It usually takes ten minutes to fill it in, but that’s ten minutes well spent if I avoid floundering around when writing the first draft. And I don’t know, although I suspect, the editing will be quicker as well. So all in all, it seems like time well spent.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 5
Production
Words written today: 1,159
Words written total: 23,070
Plus / Minus target: +2,070
Currently writing: Son of Mars
Oct 18, 2024
I began the day by starting Son of Mars from scratch again, only to decide a few words into that I had it right first time and went back to the original. A bit frustrating, but these things happen sometimes.
The beginning of the story is moving quite slowly, and I think some of it is going to turn out to be world building that doesn’t appear in the final version, but that’s fine. It is set a few hundred years before The Last Outpost so it needs a bit of fine tuning.
I have been thinking about how I am going to track my progress here on planning and editing without dumping loads of numbers at the bottom that don’t mean very much. In the next few days you will see a new statistics footer.
This is the 26th day in a row that I have published this blog and that’s probably the most I’ve ever done. They are generally quite short though, so that only adds up to around 6,000 words. There are some longer topics that I want to write about here, but at the moment I’m just figuring everything out and getting a lot of new habits locked in.
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Words written today: 1,043
Words written total: 20,876
Plus / Minus target: +1,876
Currently writing: Son of Mars
Currently publishing: n/a
Latest release: n/a
