So Many Pieces Of Paper

I’ve been trying to figure out where on earth I am in my novel, at this point there are so many revisions it’s a bit terrifying to delve back in. I think I have somewhat managed to puzzle the versions apart. Now it’s time to un-pick exactly which plot line I am following.

Sticky notes, space and a tsunami of paper led to some vague form of clarity. I am religiously staying to my schedule and as soon as I’d unravelled the mess it was time to take a break and then start something new.

At least now all my notes are in a row and I have a good starting off point for next time. If I’m sticking to my routine, that should be tomorrow!

Today’s Word Count: 350

A Good Writing Day

All the hard work planning the other day paid off. today I had the house to myself and decided to have a writing day.

I have managed to write three and a half scenes today. 🙂 It feels really good to have a proper writing day. there’s a vague possibility I will actually get my novel to a satisfactory level to send off at the end of the month. Well, the first 15,000 words anyway.

I think i may well give my brain a break for the rest of the day and do a little bit of simple sewing.

If anyone’s interested, it’s the Yeovil Literary Prize.

Today’s word count: 2030

Always read the small print

I was just getting ready to send off my flash fiction when I decided to listened to that nagging voice which told me to recheck the specifications. After finally finding the correct magazine I was very thankful to that voice. I’d completely missed the fact that the piece is supposed to be first person. It shouldn’t be difficult to edit. It will probably work better that way.

Editing will be tomorrow’s task. I was so pleased with myself for getting the flash fiction finished before the due date. If I get it sent off tomorrow I will still be one day early.

Editing Down

I Spent today revising my flash fiction down from 900 to 500. The first 200 words were easy. it began to get a little trickier after that. I think I’m happy with the result. I’m not sure if the story is any good, but my husband liked it so that’s something. My main motivation for submitting a piece of writing every month is not necessarily to get myself published, but form more habits and to lose some of the fear of sending off my work. Though winning a competition would be lovely.

Chiselling Through the Second Part of my Novel

Here we go, after much procrastination, I sat myself down at the computer and opened up Scrivener. I was determined to get started on the next part of my novel. The point of view changes in the second part and I am, in essence, rewriting this massive chunk from another perspective. With the greatest of intentions, I stared at a blank screen. Several minutes passed before I realised I could not crack on until I gathered all the scenes from this character from my earlier draft.

I spent my time copying and pasting masses of text, a lot of it very poorly written, into my current draft. In the end, this will save my time, but right now it hurts my brain. I did manage to cut out almost 4000 words by ignoring irrelevant or repeated scenes.

The only writing I actually did was a scene by scene breakdown of the next chapter. I am looking forward to writing the chapter now I have a place to start.

Word Count: 339

Words read and copied: 17,474

My eyes hurt now.

YES! done done done

After not meeting my expectations yesterday, I lowered them for today’s work, and as if by magic I finished going through the first part of my novel.

I’m delighted with myself. I’m hoping to do this as I go along for the next parts of my novel to save the deadening sensation of staring at too many numbers today. No actual words written today beside these. Tomorrow I hope to crack on with the novel, although it is therapy tomorrow so I may well be in an emotional heap on the floor. It’s my penultimate session and I am absolutely terrified!

But now, pie charts for everything!

image (16) — Characters Mentioned or Present

Almost there…

Today’s word count is not bad at all. I ended up writing far more on my Today I Made… post than I’ve ever written before.

I did not manage to go through the whole of the printed novel today as I anticipated I would yesterday. however I did get through two chapters. There are lots of new settings, characters and plot points that are now documented and organised!

Tomorrow I will hopefully get through a few more chapters. I’m around a third of the way through and enjoying reading my own writing so that is no bad thing.

Today’s word count: 860 words

Erm…one page edited today

Yes, so I only went through one page of my novel last night and today I went through one whole new page today. However last night I did draw an illustration of the page I edited. Now I not an artist, I only occasionally dapple in sketching, I do enjoy it a lot though, particularly when I get a story out of the picture.

Tomorrow I have the day completely free, so I will sit down, probably binge watch QI, and go through the rest of the novel. By the end of the day I will have a multitude of colourful pie charts – see a few posts back, I got a little obsessed with pie-charts.

happy writing

More Pie Charts for you!

Managed to go through another couple of chapters today, in-between pilates and my sister visiting with my adorable niece!

image (8) — Characters Present in the First six Chapters

image (9) — Characters Present and Mentioned in the First Six Chapters

I’m now on page of the eighty out of one hundred and fifty one. If that were a pie chart it would look like this:

At this point I am really not entirely sure what I’m doing but it is my hope this will be incredibly useful and future me will be incredibly smug. Also with future revisions I can make a copies of the original tables. I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to do much writing tomorrow as it’s Story and Rhyme time in the morning and Crafty in the afternoon. Hopefully I will get through the rest of the first part of my novel by the end of the week. I’m very much looking forward to getting back on with writing the second part.

All of the Charts!

I just love a good spreadsheet, but you know what I love more than a spreadsheet? A Pie Chart!

Today I embarked up the noble task of analysing my novel to within an inch 0f its creative life.

I’ve always needed a good visual for me to understand something properly. The steady methodical charting of characters, settings and plot points gives me a real buzz. This is the characters present pie chart for the first three chapters:

image (2)

I also a pie chart for characters who are present and those mentioned, this one is for the first four chapters. It is nice to see that the biggest chunks are for the main characters. Azura is hardly present at all but is a very important character, the second pie chart shows that.

If you’re interested in the format I used it’s the Attendance Record Template, free to download with Google Sheets. I really like the format because at the bottom of the table there is an in attendance sheet, essentially a total, for how many characters there are in each chapter. I may have to strip mine back a little but I won’t bother with any of that until I’ve completed this revision of my entire novel. For the most part I’m only trying to get a complete list of my characters and playing with charts as I do so.