Well, another late start to the day, and another day yesterday, with not writing, but a bit of a new revelation with the direction I need to go. After reading Jim Butchers journal on scenes and sequels writing, it got me to thinking overall about where I’m going with my novel. And, it occurs to me at the moment, that I’m stuck in a bit of a too much detailed approach. I’m just down writing in the trenches, and not giving enough thought to where I want the story to go. I’m not really thinking about the larger picture. The fact, that I’ve written about 50K words, and it’s all under the prologue section of the novel, should be my first clue. What I have in my original outline, is not the outline for a single novel, but really the outline for like a 6 or 8 part series of novels. Which is fine, since I think it’s in a genre that has an audience. I really just didn’t have a good understanding, of what I was biting off when I started writing the novel. What I’ve written so far, about 55K words is enough for a first novel, but I need to break it out into more detail. I’ve kind of gotten lost in the detail of writing, and lost track of the bigger picture of the novel. I need to step back a bit, and organize the big blob words that I’ve written, into individual scenes, and make sure those scenes have something going for them. Make sure they have a conflict, and a goal, and a set back, like Jim talked about on his journal. Which is really the stuff Dwight Swain talks about in his selling writer book. This may mean I’m in for a bunch of rewriting, but it also means, I may finally have a better grasp of what the story is about and where it’s going. I do need to read a few more from Jim’s blog about story climax and arch. Basically overall structure. I’m not sure, that I’ve really followed a structure, actually, I know I haven’t, but I can take a look at it again and see where the story fits. I don’t have an ending yet for the story, but perhaps taking this approach, I can come up with a good ending. By simply reworking the novel that is already written, to fall into a more structured approach, then perhaps I can come up with a better ending. Given, that I was a bit in doubt as to where the ending was going, maybe that’s not a bad idea. I also reread Rachel Aaron’s blog post (since turned into a book) about how she went from writing 2000 words per day to writing over 10,000 words per day, and it actually made a lot more sense to me. It’s a pretty amazing feat she performed, and I think, that I could probably perform the same feat. I know, I’ve written 1600 words or so in an hour, which is about what she does, and the trick of doing a bit of outlining for 5 minutes or so prior to writing made a huge difference for her. I still haven’t reached my 5k per day goal yet, but I think if I use the outlining and structure stuff that Jim talks about in his blog, combined with some of Rachel’s tips, I should be able to get to 10K per day eventually myself. Basically, that would allow me to write a rough draft for a novel in 2 weeks. Then, I could edit, do covers, outline the next book, or whatever for the following 2 weeks and really publish a good sized book every month. That would be incredibly cool. Could you imagine how productive that would be. That would be incredible. A 100K word book published every month. That’s like 400 pages per month. I would definitely hit my million crap words that every writer needs to go through in the first year. If that doesn’t get the pay checks coming, then I don’t really know what else will. While, I haven’t gotten much written the last few days, I feel like I’m going through a new level of understanding in terms of the writing process. Steps that I had to go through to become a better writer. It’s not just butt in chair time that makes a better writer, but it’s the quality of that butt in chair time that really matters. Thats, what I’ve accomplished the last few days. Time to get organizing that novel.

LOCATION: home office WORDSWRITTEN: 0 PUSHUPS: 30 TODO: organize novel into proper scenes, yoga TV: dr who BOOK: none GAME: none EXERCISE: squash house league WEIGHT: 174 BREAKFAST: bacon & eggs LUNCH: big ass salad DINNER: taco salad SNACKS: orange, grapes, banana, apple, mixed nuts ALCOHOL: none BEDTIME: 12:30 AWAKE: 9:00