Where are you? (in your novel)

First draft done, and now taking a break to work on another project before revising! I'm concerned that logistically my novel doesn't make much sense, though - that's one of the major "global" problems I'll need to address when I take a look at it again. As for the new project, it's a romance novel, and since it's my first, I've prefaced a lot of the actual writing with research into the genre.

In the middle of main events and losing steam rapidly. These are the super cool things I've been building up to for a month! The big finale! Everything happening! Characters are walking into traps and making bad decisions and almost making good ones for the entirely wrong reasons and tiny little details from chapter two have made it in and it is all coming to a head!

I am bored by it.

Time to step back and take a breath, I think.

OH. HEY. I THINK I JUST FIGURED IT OUT. I have been making too much external stuff happen when the real conflict is internal. No wonder this felt like a let down when people were shooting baddies and evil people were trapping good people and all that crap was going down. Because that's not the point! We need a revelation! Excuse me, breathing time is over.

I threw down a really really rough first draft and am in the process of rewriting everything. Even though a lot is changing, getting some form of a first draft is important to me. Something about rewriting bad sections seems less daunting than a blank page.

At the apex, just before the end, where I don't have a solution for what happens to character 1 that doesn't kill him, but gets him out of the scene long enough for character 2 to arrive and kill his best friend, character 3, without character 1 knowing he did it or why.

Other than that, fingers are flying. Well, sometimes it's a hand, but thwack, and it's gone. What? You cut off my brother's finger. Well, I'm taking off your brother's hand. How do you like that? Here's a lock of your lover's hair. Oh, and here's her finger, too. Next time it'll be her nipple.

That's where I am.

WriteMinded said:

Other than that, fingers are flying. Well, sometimes it's a hand, but thwack, and it's gone. What? You cut off my brother's finger. Well, I'm taking off your brother's hand. How do you like that? Here's a lock of your lover's hair. Oh, and here's her finger, too. Next time it'll be her nipple.

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*peeks in* Hey everybody!

I am doing what I normally do and jumping around to the part of the WIP that I feel like working on right now. Atm, that part is the beginning of the story. I previously had it starting in the middle of some action, but I've decided that it might be better to take it back in time a little bit and show what started the action instead.

I'm also going to try really hard to just go ahead and write the stinking thing down instead of taking forever and a day like I usually do.

Well, I thought I was in the last 10K of revisions, but a giant plotmonster refuses to be solved without at least another 5K of manipulation and back story.

I'm currently doing a celebratory dance for winning an online writing contest and I'm planning my novella for Camp NaNo. Sort of a YA Tell-Tale Heart adaptation with some other stuff mixed in for flavor.

I have words on a page! Finally just told myself to stop with the world building and figuring out all the details and just get writing. The rest will come as I need them.

Now if only I would get healthy so I could write more then a couple pages a day...

Officially finished with the first draft.

I fell about 8K words short of where I wanted to be in section 7, but I realized that I was trying to make up more story just to fill the word-count. It was boring. I was boring myself. It would have bored the reader. Better to wrap things up and let it compost. It'll gain words in revisions anyway.

So there. The Bear's Wife is now in Time Out, and I am now line-editing my Settlement trilogy.

Katharine Tree said:

Officially finished with the first draft.

I fell about 8K words short of where I wanted to be in section 7, but I realized that I was trying to make up more story just to fill the word-count. It was boring. I was boring myself. It would have bored the reader. Better to wrap things up and let it compost. It'll gain words in revisions anyway.

So there. The Bear's Wife is now in Time Out, and I am now line-editing my Settlement trilogy.

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That's a good call. Very good self control if you're able to realize that and stop when you need to stop. I tend to ramble when I write, and it costs me a lot of editing time.

Congrats on finishing the first draft! Celebrate! That's a huge accomplishment.

Within 4K of being done.

I have painted my fictional town so nicely that my yobbish louts just won't behave plausibly yobbishly. Everyone is too damned nice.

I've been doing some deeply terrible work and right now I'm in the middle of a very messy chapter where my MC's wife asks him if he's having an affair, and...it's turning out better than anything I've written lately. I mean, it's still really terrible, but I can salvage it.

I have just typed 'The End' on my giraffe kidnap novel. It's a good, tight first draft, so the editing is going to go very quickly this time. (I hope) I just have to add six or seven small points earlier in the draft to foreshadow events, and then look at the thing on a sentence level.

A strange thing I have noticed about doing this is that I write comedy that is funnier and more effortless when I am pissed off, which has the added bonus that I then cheer up.

Typing 'The End' has cheered me up no end. And I am now on holiday for a week and a half. Life is good.

Where am I? That is the question. I hope to find the answer soon.

Shoring up. Tightening up. Adding bits and pieces. Thinking of new things to make into A Thing, instead of just letting them be. Is a cake ever just a cake? Ceci n'est pas une pipe? Mais non, ceci est toujours une pipe. Une pipe formidable.

Crap on everything. I'm so frustrated.

Still 3 scenes from being done. The other 2 are being held up by the first one, which just won't pop into my head, despite the fact that I know what happens in it. Usually dialogue will spring to mind and I craft the rest of the scene around it, but the dialogue in this one just won't. The characters are all there in the setting, but they just keep looking at each other, waiting to see who will speak first. Sometimes this means I have a POV issue, and it can be solved by changing which character the scene is viewed through, but this one HAS to be from the antagonist's POV because he's the one with the biggest stake in the game. It's his moment, where he thinks everything has worked out nicely for him, before things turn on their head. Why won't he just fecking well SAY something??

I'm about 2/3 of the way through with my current WIP. The Taylor kids are at camp in Medicine Hat and are trying to get to the bottom of a series of pranks that have been played on some of the cabins. Paige just got a threatening note trying to get her to drop the investigation or get pranked herself.

Inching along. This is the slowest book I've ever written. 67K words and worried that it's going to be 200K

Just over 30k into a projected 75k for book two in the series. Book one is due for release in January so I need to crack on!

Literally just finished the first Chapter of my latest WIP. Feels good because I have been planning the plot for this one for AGES.

I'm switching the story from 1st person to third person, which is really tedious and annoying. But I switched the POV character, so the changes have to be done.

I just hit the big reveal, only I realized that my secret is really complicated and no one wants to just come out and tell my poor main character what is going on.

Main character is fighting a swarm of giant, prehistoric insects. At the moment, she's losing badly. Meanwhile, occurring simultaneously in another scene, her brother's accidentally joining a rebellion.