Well, it's been a while since I've updated this blog with something about my actual writing. Since the point of this blog is to separate my reviews from my writing updates, it kind of defeats the purpose if I don't keep people updated about my writing.
That being said, ever since Nathan laid down the law, I have been writing every day, missing only a day or so out of the week. I should be writing every day, but I think that having a day where I don't write be the abnormality, rather than the days I do write, is a step in the right direction. Right now what I need to do is increase my minimum from a thousand words a day to two thousand. I try my best to never be under a thousand words, but sometimes it just happens. The nice thing about a thousand words minimum is that anything below five hundred words just isn't satisfactory and hardly counts as actually writing. And by the time I've reached five hundred words, going to a thousand just isn't a big deal anymore. And once you reach a thousand words, what's to stop you from writing a few hundred more? And then a thousand more?
I'll tell you what stops me, the fact that sometimes I don't start writing until one in the morning. This is a bad habit, I need to stop it.
I should take the time to say that this is all thanks to Nathan, and in part to Jason (who created a nifty excel document that we can all use to keep track of our progress and compare it to the rest of writing group. Makes it much easier to be accountable when you see how much you are sucking), that I've been able to reach this phase where I'm writing pretty much every day. He doesn't have to get on my case, but he does, and I appreciate it, since I'm finally moving to that phase where I will be able to get myself to write so much more easily.
That and it's kind of shameful to have to be forced to do something I love and want to do for a living. My eventual goal is to be known as one of the more prolific writers published. This will take a while to happen.
That being said, I'm currently most likely half way through Dragon's Egg, I have a good chunk of it planned, and once I finish my long form notes for the plot I'm going to start working on planning my next book. I intend to have this book be fifty thousand words, but I imagine it will be a bit longer than that. So I'm either halfway, or three fifths of the way through.
There's a lot that's going to need to be changed up, some major edits that need doing. Since the book is meant to be a middle grade I'm going to need to remove a fair bit of violence (I honestly can't help it, I don't think I'm cut out to be a middlegrade writer, YA might be as young as I go). But since I like the violence, I'm going to make two edits. A middlegrade edit that is meant as a gift for my cousin, and a YA version that I'll actually try to get sold. This depends of course on which version I like better. If I go the YA route I'm going to have to make Melan a good few years older. And once I do that, a lot is going to change. The earlier stuff written when she was still ten, and everything else written when she was twelve. But I think for now I'm going to finish it up, and then start work on my next book after I do the middlegrade edits. This will be the first actual book I've finished (full length that is, I've finished plenty of shorter (sucky) stories, but never a full length book). What I need to do next is start on a new project so that I can actually claim to have a portfolio.
Anyway, classes have started again, which means the real challenge starts now. Now we see if I can make myself write even though I have homework, and if I can juggle it all along with keeping up to date on my blog.
Pray for me, people. Pray for me.
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