From the Writer's Desk - Into August

Tomorrow is the 1st of August. This year feels as though it has flown by.  A lot of the people I know have said the same thing. Some of it, I think, is that too many of us are always looking forward to the weekends, towards some future date or event. Some, I think, may be that age thing.

I have finally finished transcribing all of my handwritten pages. I revised as I added them, changing things or catching an inconsistency. I wrote further after I finished transcribing. My spreadsheet deal says I'm about 67% finished and I need to write 768 to finish Behind the Masque by August 31st. That is my deadline. Self-imposed, but a deadline all the same. There is a slight hiccup with those numbers though. When I entered the original word count goal - I figured 75,000 words should give me enough room to tell a story - it's contemporary, fairly straight forward.

Then my characters got involved.

I'm just over 50,000 words into it. I'm fairly certain this will hit 100,000 words. Or close to it. At least the first draft. Then I'll sit on it for a bit before revising it again - and submit it. It started out intended for one thing, but took a duck walk early on. So, I'll submit it. Hopefully it's liked and accepted.  I have more details to add when I start revising. Questions that I wrote in the margin of my manuscript that may or may not require research or rewriting depending on what happened at the end of the story.

My goals are time based instead of word count based. My focus WIP is Behind the Masque. My goal is to write at least 1 hour every day. To spend at least half of that actually writing sentences that belong in the story. But part of writing is also research, it's also character development and set design. There is a lot more to writing, then simply sitting down to the computer or notebook and writing. I had to give myself permission to do that. If you're writing a paranormal, sci-fi, or fantasy then there is a lot more that has to be done. Because worlds and cultures must be explored and created in addition to figure out where the characters are heading now, because they don't care what you as the writer wants. Not really. They don't even fake it.

In reading news, I'm reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which was not listed on the books (here) I was going to choose from.

So,7 hours of writing - 1 hour per day this week. My 30-day Writing Challenge is also supposed to kick off tomorrow, which is 1 hour of actually story writing, not any part of the writing process.

Happy Reading.

Blessings,
Simone.