March Update: Lots of editing

I forgot that March is also a rough month for me. My mood fluctuates with the shifting weather, which is never consistent.

That said, I feel like I made a fair amount of progress this month. Not on anything I thought I would, but it wasn't a wasted month, that's for sure.

I started with a novel copy edit for one of my writers. That was an intensive, time-consuming project, but it went well and I feel good about it.

But. It had me in a very editing frame of mind. Maybe because of the dev edits then copy edits for two different projects that weren't mine. So, after one writing day trying to work on CLC, where I only managed 650 words before I let myself stop, I switched over to editing.

Yeah, yeah. Past Sara apparently knew better than I gave her credit for. I did need a break. From writing. From CLC. I wrote over 20k on it in two months, and I was getting bored. Which, isn't good when writing. Means readers will likely get bored. But. Either way. Taking a break was good.

I got myself excited for editing Mystwatch 2 by reading Mystwatch 3. Sound strange? It's not. I love that third book. I was going in to do a developmental editing treatment for it, but the truth is, I think structurally, it's solid. There are parts I thought about cutting or rearranging, but once I got in there, I decided everything is where it needs to be, and while I could trim up some spots, I think everything that's there needs to be. Although I will admit that after a month trying to edit book 2, I am starting to doubt my ability to recognize what is needed and isn't needed in my own books. I like all these scenes, all the dialogue. I don't want to cut anything. And each pass it gets bigger.

Anyway. There are things I need to tweak for book 3, don't get me wrong. It has a few things that need addressing in pretty big ways, and I haven't decided what to do about it, yet. But the fixes are more like a handful of lines here and there rather than writing entire new scenes or moving things around.

Which I am still doing with book 2. After about a week poking at book 3, I finally switched to book 2. And ugh. It needs so much work, still.

This will be the...third? Fourth? Fourth time, I think, that I've torn the pieces apart and rearranged them. Some of that is because the plot changes I'm making to book 2 have made it so a lot of other things need tweaking. Fixing the shelf paper as I go, as it were. I also needed to do a lot with my main character's motivation. She's very wishy washy in the current draft. Very reactive. So I made her proactive, and then also reactive to the things she proactively made happen. That sounds confusing, I know. Basically, for the first half of the book, she kind of just let people dictate what she could and couldn't do, and she grumbled about it a lot (very meanly, making her not very likeable). When she finally does something, it doesn't go well, and she goes back to not doing anything. And that happens three times. So I had to give her more action. Yes, she still has to deal with the fallout of her actions. But she's actually taking action. And moping less. And trying harder, honestly.

Anyway. That was a digression. I am making progress there. Slow progress. I beat my head against the wall for a few days, writing a new chapter I thought I needed. It's where I'd stopped my last attempt editing this last year, this new chapter. I spent an entire day trying to write it, after deciding what all needed to go into it. The entire day was pain. Each sentence I wrote, I wondered...is this hard because I don't want to write this, or because I don't need to write it.

Turns out, as a writer, you gotta trust yourself sometimes. It was hard to write because it didn't need to exist. I wasted an entire day coming up with a chapter that I did not need. That was rough. It made me nearly quit the book, again.

But. After giving my brain a break for a day, I sat down and wrote several brainstorming documents worth of, okay, if I don't write this chapter, what do I need to do instead? What parts that I came up with for this new chapter would still be good to include? If I don't put the parts from other chapters I was going to put here don't go here, after all, where do they go?

So I wrote a whole new outline of fixes I need to make for about seven chapters in the middle. Not all of it is big fixes. But I do need to write two new scenes and a montage. In a different place than where I was writing. Ugh.

I also still have to find places for a plotline that...well, should exist but doesn't, considering book 3. Which shouldn't be a lot. Just sentences here and there. And information in places where, before, I was vague.

The hardest part with all of that is making room for the new parts by cutting out some of the old stuff. Especially when it's a funny line or a nice moment. Hell, I had a really lovely scene in the new chapter I wrote that I can't use at all, sadly. But. I think right now, my focus will just be on putting new stuff in. I will worry about cutting stuff on another pass. I'd rather have everything I need and stuff I don't when I sit down to do the next phase of editing than have to write new stuff again.

Although the new stuff I'm adding, while I was uncertain about at first, I think has been really great. I guess we'll see if I still feel that way when I pick this back up again.

Which won't be for a couple of months. I got my editing to-do outline to a good place so I know what needs to happen for at least ten or so chapters. I think the next time I work on this, I'll have to do the same thing for the ten or so chapters after that, once I've got the middle section worked out.

Next month, I'll be working on a Sally Prescott adventure. I've signed up for Camp Nano, and I'm going to try to write the whole adventure. I need about 16k words. I've given myself May for overflow if I don't get there, but May, I go back to CLC. Then June, I will take another crack at editing book 2 of Mystwatch.

I don't know if I can wrap up my book 2 edit in a month. I still have October as a "wrap up projects" month along with Druid Wars 2 outline. So if I need to, I can finish it then. But. Maybe I can. My client did a massive dev edit rewrite in less than a month. And I made a lot of progress on my edit this month, even with spending a week on a copy edit for a client, and a little over a week focused on book 3. So, yeah. Maybe a full month focused on the second book, I'll be able to muddle through to the end. Although June isn't actually a full month, either. I have another copy edit to do for a week, and I'm spending a week traveling. So that really only gives me two weeks, again. I doubt I'll get to the end, then. Or maybe I will, now that I know what I need to do for most of the upcoming chapters. I won't be stuck, this time. I can just sit down and power through my detailed list of edits.

It might still need another editing pass, even after I'm done this one. Once I've got all the pieces in there that I think it needs to make a better story. Then, of course, the polishing begins. That'll take...well, hard to say. I've polished book one so many times, now. I'm not sure it'll ever live up to the polish of that book. But it doesn't have to, I suppose. Someday, maybe I'll hire an actual editor.

All right. This entry got long, devolving into vague details only I understand about my books. But. I think that's a nice change from talking about my 10-year plan. It's nice to talk about craft and stories rather than timelines and products. For now, I am focusing on the creative side. Maybe in a year or two, I'll start to think about the business stuff.

This year, I just want to make sure I can work on writing at least seven days out of the month. So far so good on that one! I spent fourteen days working on Mystwatch edits this month.

Three months of writing and editing so far. I am still doing this! Hope I can keep it up. I think I can. Even when I was "in a fight" with writing this month, I still didn't have any desire to quit. I think that's a good sign.

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!

January Update: Here we go!

So, last month, the end of last year, I made a lot of ambitious goals for 2022. I went from, "I'm probably going to give up on writing" to, "let's give it a solid try for one more year." I was worried that'd crush my fragile creativity, but as it turns out, it's the best thing I could have done.

Things are going well.

Well enough that I think I am going to go back to monthly posts. If I'm really going to be writing and editing as much as my new Ambitious Plan has outlined, monthly check-ins will be necessary, I think. My quarterly updates last year were pretty long, and I wasn't doing that much.

So! Here us an update for January.

Actually, first, an update for December. Heh.

I wrote some more, after that last blog post. My initial goal, after sitting down with spreadsheets to plan out my 2022, was to write 2k more words on CLC so I could go into 2022 with CLC's word count at 60k. That didn't happen, but I did write almost 700 words on it, which isn't nothing. I also sat down with the SP adventure I was struggling with and wrote a 1700 word outline for it. So, I know roughly what happens in that story, now. That should help when I do Camp NaNo in April. I still don't know if I can write two SP adventures in a year, but the work I did in December should help.

Of course, Sally Prescott is a future Sara thing. Present Sara is hammering out words on CLC.

In January, I edited up the Shane Mystwatch short story (it took much less editing than I thought it needed). I sent it to my friends, but I don't think anyone has read it, yet. Ah, well. I wrote it mostly for me. And for Shane. I added to a scene in Mystwatch 3, only about 300 words, but I addressed something that I realized was bugging me (why didn't Stark ever tell Makai what he was?? I came up with a pretty simple answer). And THEN. Drumroll, please. I wrote not my 8k word goal for CLC, not 9k, but 10k on CLC!

Which means I not only blew past my January goal, but I also made up for the words I didn't manage in December. Woohoo!! And boy, is that novel coming along. Action scenes, plots moving forward. The three MCs are together, now, so that's been challenging. But fun. I have hit a bit of a wall, though. One of the things on my to-do list is to fix the outline. I've been kicking that thing down the line all month because it didn't affect what I was currently writing. Well, I've caught up to where it gets messy. So, yeah. Before I write anymore, I need to spend some time with the outline to figure out what scenes I need, what emotional beats I need to hit, and whose POV the remaining 7-8 chapters need to be in. I don't think it'll be hard. Most of it is there. Although looking back over my notes, I found something I disagree with Past Sara about. I hope that doesn't totally derail me. Part of the reason I was stuck on this book so long was that I knew how I wanted it to end, but I didn't know how to get there. Once I figured that piece out, I was able to get excited about it again. So, yeah. There are a few pieces I need to hammer out before I can start writing 1.2k, 1.5k, 2.2k words in a day again. I was hoping to do that yesterday, but I ran out of steam. I'll try to work on that tonight.

I am averaging my usual 1200 words per writing session. That can take anywhere from an hour to three hours, depending on what day it is and how motivated I am. So, all of my ambitious goals seem like they might actually be possible. I'm not sure I can actually write 14k words on a SP adventure in a month, but I am going to try. April, July, and November, I will push myself to write more than I do on a normal month.

Of course, my biggest fear right now is that, because I had a successful month, I am an absolute failure if I can't manage it again. So I'm trying to be gentle with myself. Yes, for February, I am aiming for 8k on CLC again. But I will also be editing a novel for someone, and maybe editing a novella for someone else. I can't expect to make 10k every month. And if I don't hit 8k next month, I've shown I can make it up on other months.

I actually did a lot of thinking about what broke me. And I think I've decided that it was unrealistic expectations of myself and pinning my dreams on a lot of factors I had no control over. My plan was to keep writing while querying. The idea was, I'd write a book, query it, and if it didn't get picked up, I'd move it to my self-publishing pile. Rinse, repeat, until I either got picked up by an agent, or had enough books written to keep myself going as a self-published writer. The trouble was, querying took all of my brain power. All of my brain was focused on analytical stuff, which left no room for creativity. Writing words as your product isn't the same as creating a product that doesn't require creativity. But once I got behind on my "product," my timeline went out the window. And the rejection was discouraging, as well. I'd built this whole system, and the system failed me. My system. The publishing industry. I didn't make contingency for failure on both fronts. My timelines imploded, my passion was long gone, and, overwhelmed with bitterness, I gave up the dream.

There's a bit more to it than that, obviously. Depression, other interests, a complete change in faith, disillusionment in things I'd had confidence in before. But overall, I set myself up for failure, and failure washed away the foundation I'd built everything on.

I'm slowly rebuilding. I've been working to find other ways to keep myself writing and motivated. So far, in the month and a half I've been working on this new plan, it's mostly been "is this going to work" as my motivation. I've asked myself a question. If I structure things this way, will I get things done, and will I work my way back to enjoying the process. I'm giving it a tentative timeline of this year (and maybe next, but I'm not looking too far ahead yet). By the end of this year, if I've gotten the things done I set out for myself to accomplish and didn't hate it, I will do another year. If, by the end of this year, I've failed again, I may still give it another year. But. I'm mostly doing this year to see how I feel, not what I get done. I will reassess at the end of this year. I will have a lot of data to parse, at that point.

As of right now, I'm jazzed but nervous. I actually feel like I might get to the end of CLC. That is really exciting. I'm actually thinking about swapping writing and editing months so I can keep working on it in March instead of taking a break. I'd hate to lose the momentum by switching to Mystwatch for March, then SP for April. But I'm going to reassess that at the end of February.

I am going into Februrary hopeful. I'm trying not to stress about expectations. It's only 8k words. That's only 1k words eight different times in February. I've kept this reasonable, which is why I managed to get 10k last month. I used to write 15k words in a good month. And I may strive for that again someday. But I am starting small and reasonable and seeing if I can achieve my ambitious goals that way without killing myself.

Because as Dianne said, the best way to kill your creativity is push yourself when your burnt out. I don't want to push. I mean, I do want to push. I want to push myself to do what I think I can. But not more than I can. It's such a hard balance. Goals too easy, I won't take it seriously. Goals too hard, I'll give up in frustration.

I guess the biggest goal is just figure out what kind of writer I am, now. Because I am still a writer. I may only be writing for myself. Or maybe self-publish someday in the future when I'm bored and have an even bigger back catalog. But for now, I'm writing for me. I'm the only one who seems interested in reading what I write, anyway. Knowing it just has to be good enough for me takes a lot of the pressure off. Makes it fun.

Hopefully next month I will still be this positive. Tentatively optimistic! Let's do this!