February Update: Still positive!

Woohoo, I made it through February! February is always a rough month for me, both mentally and physically. Good thing it's the shortest month of the year.

Not only did I make it through, but I achieved my writing goal! Not only did I achieve my writing goal, I surpassed it! I finished out my writing session yesterday with 12k words for February. I did a 2.4k word day yesterday, and I was already almost 2k past my goal at that point. So, yeah. I can do this. One month, I can see it as a fluke. Doing it two months in a row may still be a fluke, but it gives me more confidence that I can do it again. I'm feeling like I have set myself reasonable writing goals, and it feels so dang good when I surpass them!

I officially broke the 80k mark on Chain Letter Choice. I have written the same amount of words I ended NaNo with on that novel. Which feels amazing. The only problem is, I figured this novel would wrap up in around 90k words. I don't think that's going to work out unless I cut some scenes from my outline. Right now, I don't want to cut anything I'd planned. Pacing-wise, these scenes feel important. Also for character development. So, I'm leaving them in. If I decide this novel needs to be cut down to 90k words, I can cut in other places. I'm taking my time getting through the scenes I'm writing rather than rushing through them. It's balancing my need to be a discovery writer (things I don't expect keep popping up) but also my terror that stops me from writing when I don't know what comes next. I'm liking this detailed outline thing. It turns out it's not actually that detailed.

Trouble is, I keep having to revamp it. I'm already a chapter or two off from where I thought I was going to be. So there will be at least a few more chapters than I thought. Which is fine. But again, that means it'll come in closer to 100k or more when all is said and done. I might have to sit down with my outline sometime this month and restructure it. Again. But I'm waiting to see if it's just chapter numbers that are off, or if I have to swap order of POV again. I may need to add a chapter, which actually means adding two, since I'm putting normal human chapters between agent chapters.

Anyway! I'd talked about swapping editing and writing months for March in my update for last month. And I think my plan is to do that. If I can write 8k-10k words more on CLC in March, I should be within 10k-12k of wrapping it up. I had planned on doing Sally Prescott for Camp NaNo, but I'm reluctant to abandon CLC so close to the end. I do not see myself writing 20k in March, so I'll have to decide if I am going to take a break from CLC for SP, or if I'm going to punt SP down another month or two. Or maybe I just write one SP this year. I know I need to write two per year to get them all done before I turn 50, but I don't think I've ever managed two complete SP adventures in one year. One and a half, maybe. But two this year might be unrealistic, since this is my first year getting back into more frequent writing.

I'll give it some more thought once I get to the end of March, but maybe I can work on finishing CLC through April, work on SP in May, then take my editing break in June. By June, I will need a writing break. I scheduled in a writing break for March because I figured after two months of writing more than I had a month in awhile, I'd need a break. But I feel good! I feel confident and excited about my novel. I'd love to wrap it up before moving on to another project, if possible.

So, yeah. That's been my progress, and those are my goals. I'm really doing this. It's going well, and I'm so happy about it. I even did the novel dev edit for one of my writers and a complete edit for the novella for my other author. And I still got my own writing done. I made an effort to guard my writing days, and it worked. I got things back to my authors closer to the deadlines I'd given myself rather than early like I prefer, but I think that's okay. Good, even.

Editing for other people definitely has me thinking harder about my own writing. I know I'm still writing for myself, at this point, but some of the things I'm telling my writers echo through my head as I'm writing. Is this scene doing more than one thing? What is it showing? Does another scene do this better? It's helped me hone in on what I want each scene to do. Not only advance the plot, but reveal characterization and advance character relationships.

Anyway. Tomorrow is our monthly meeting, so no writing again until this weekend. I've thought of a couple of things I might want to tweak in what I just wrote, and also about how I can maybe cut parts of my outline. Maybe I'll do that this week, since I'm not writing until this weekend. But we'll see. Maybe I'll just keep moving forward rather than looking back.

Either way, the last two months have shown I can do this. I am doing this!