More Headdesk Please

Well, it's been a month and how many words have I written? That would be a big fat 0. *sigh*

I'm trying not to get all down on myself but it's hard. I hate even mentioning I'm a writer right now because I haven't written much of anything in the past two months. It's very irritating.

But I have been working on my story in general. I've been typing up all my scene notes into my computer so that I have them safe somewhere besides on note cards, where small children can get to them. This will also be helpful because I can work on my story from my Chrome Book. I've got remote desktop set up between the Book and my laptop. So once I have all the notes in, I can work on writing anytime and anywhere in my house.

Although, in the process of putting those note cards in, I see how much further I sill have to write and it's a little daunting.

Why do I torture myself this way?

What Is This "Writing" You Speak Of?

(I wrote this all up yesterday, but forgot to hit the "Publish" button...)

Seriously, what is it? Because I'm not doing it.

All that fire and drive I've had before is just gone. And it pisses me off. My brain keeps finding "better" things to do with my time, mostly sleeping. If I don't get up early in the morning and jump on writing right away, I'm screwed. I have no other chance to do it during the day. There's too many other things to do.

But you know, I guess this is what makes someone a "real" writer. The people who write because they have to, not just because want to or because they feel inspired. But it's soooo hard!

So I guess all I can do now is to keep trying and commit to doing better. Maybe, one day, I'll get this whole "being a productive human being" thing down.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

WUW: Stalled

It's like my brain shut down on Saturday and has refused to do much of anything, including writing, since.

I think it's this next scene. I just don't feel like writing it. That or I'm just at a loss for words. It's a romantic scene and I'm not very experienced with those. I also feel like I have limited real life experience for this. I pretty much married my first boyfriend and things were pretty boring and typical in our relationship.

I want to have this scene in the story, I think it fits and will do a lot to develop characters. I've got it all planned out, it's just the words are lacking. I might be putting too much pressure on my self. Trying to think of the perfect way to write it because this feels like an important scene to me. Plus, I'm terrified it will be boring.

In theory, I could just skip the scene and come back to it later, but it would just nag at me in the back of my head and drive me to distraction. At this point, I think it's important for me to go in order so that I can keep up with the flow of the story.

I just need to get over my self, really, that's what this all comes down too. But it's so hard! I can remind my self over and over again that it doesn't matter how awful it is now, I can just fix it later, but that's not helping. As I've been going over some past scenes I've been surprised that they aren't as terrible as I was afraid they'd be, so you'd think that would comfort me right now, but it's not.

*sigh* Oh well, I'll just plug along and keep on keeping on. I'll take all the advice I've given others, in all my infinite wisdom (snort), and apply it to my self like a good little writer and JUST KEEP WRITING.

WUW: Progress is Slow

I'm plugging along. It's been slow because I've been lazy and haven't been writing as much as I should. Although I am at an easy part right now. I'm just reading over scenes and making minor adjustments, mostly plot related. I'll be getting to a string of new scenes here soon.

So, in the past few days I've gone from 78 scenes to 74. Mostly it's been combining tiny scenes into whole bigger ones. Nothing has been thrown out except for unneeded note cards. I've completed 10 of those scenes which means I'm about 14% of the way through this thing. And I'm now up to 25,100 words total.

And according to my calculations, I should still have this draft finished by the beginning of October.

And that's all I have for now folks! I hope you have an Awesome Wednesday Full of Writing Win!

WUW: Where the Real Writing Begins

This week I have begun working on my Official Real First Draft. The only difference between this and what I've written before is that I have the complete story all planned out. No big missing spaces filled with "SOMETHING HAPPENS HERE BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT YET". It's a good feeling.

Also, I now get to focus more on the words since I have the story all figured out. Of course, I still stare at the screen blankly a lot because in stead of thinking "What happens now?" I'm thinking, "What's the best way to describe this?"

So my word count out put has been a little bit low. Only 4082 for the past week. But I did get my first scene/chapter done. Opening chapters are the hardest. You have to make sure you're capturing your reader and making them excited for the story ahead as well as giving them all the information they need in a not boring or info dumping manner. It's a lot to think about.

What do you find hard to write, openings, endings, or something in between? Leave a comment!

Thanks for reading and have a Wednesday full of Writing Win!

WUW: Finding The Ending

I didn't post last week on any of my blogs because we had family over and I didn't even touch my computer all week. So not a lot of writing got done either. Thus, I will tell you what I was going to tell you last week.

I FOUND MY ENDING!!!

Ever since I started writing this story I've been searching for an ending, but I could never find one. Even as I was coming up with my climax(es), I still didn't know how everything would end. But it finally hit me last week and it was a joyous occasion. I've got it all wrapped up nice and tidy but with some wiggle room for a second book if need be.

Right now I'm getting these last dozen scenes written out on note cards and then I'm going to start writing my real first draft from scene 1 and on to The End. I'm assuming that this first draft will be close to 120,000 words long. Also, I'm hoping to get this first draft completed by October sometime so that I can do a real NaNoWriMo this year and start working on my new White Crow idea. I'm not going to set a hard and fast deadline on that, because those never work for me, but we'll see how it goes.

So once that first draft gets started I'm going to do updates on here that say how many words I wrote the past week and how many scenes I completed out of the total scene count (which I think is going to be about 80 scenes). I know once I have all of this planned out properly, the writing will become much easier. I won't have to stop and stare at the screen and think, "Now what?".

Thanks for reading! Have a happy Wednesday and I hope you get lots of writing time and good words this week!

What's Up Wednesday? Not Much

Well I'm late, but that's okay. I honestly don't have much to say. I've been very productive this week, but I'm still working with the note cards. I'm almost done outlining the 70,000+ words I have so far and I've come up with 12 new scenes to be inserted into those 70K words. I'm rough guesstimating (that's an actual word?) that those 12 scenes will get me about 16,000 more words. This story is definitely going to be 90K, if not 100K, words long. *passes out* That's a lot of words.

So, yeah, I'm still plugging away. I'd really like to have this whole story plotted out and begin working on the real first draft by the end of July. It would be kind of nice to have the first draft finished and resting by November so that I can do NaNoWriMo this year. But we'll see. My writing plans and deadlines almost never work out. :)

And of course, before I go, I'll share some more Chuck Wendig gold. If you're not following his blog already then you need to fix that. 50 RANTYPANTS SNIDBITS OF RANDOM WRITING & STORYTELLING ADVICE  My favorites are #1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 34, 45, 49 & 50. So, like, all of them. :D