"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
-Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Weekly review

This wasn't a great week for progress on my goals. I did a lot of writing for an unproductive week - 7 1/4 hours and 4,773 words - but that was all on a "fun" project, not anything publishable. Other than that I managed to outline 2 scenes on RoB&F.

I did have a great meeting with my writers' group, the Word DaWGz, though. (I know, the name will never gain us the respectability of something like the Elks Club. It's short for Daytime Writers' Group.) My whole plan for this year was to have three primary projects, one in each major phase - development, writing and editing. And I thought I'd managed it, but I'm really not quite there yet.

I am developing TAWS, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for that novel. But I'm supposed to be writing E&L, and when I tried I realised I needed to almost completely change one of the main characters, add a whole new subplot and move the beginning of the story back significantly. So I'm actually developing that one, too.

And RoB&F, which I'm editing? Well, it's currently right around 50,000 words. In order to make it publishable I need to add about 30,000 more words. Which is actually fine; there were a couple of places in the story that I skimmed where I want to develop it more and I left a huge opportunity for an early, unsuccessful confrontation with the antagonist that I didn't use. But that means that, in figuring out where the spots that need more writing are and what I'm going to do with them, RoB&F is really in the development stage right now, as well.

So what I'm going to do is focus on one project until it's out of the development stage - probably E&L, because I think it's closest. Then I will work on E&L (writing) and RoB&F until I have RoB&F out of the development stage. And then I'll be able to add in TAWS and I'll have a project for whatever mood I'm in. And one of the people in my group, E--, suggested that I block out time for each project instead of waiting for inspiration to strike about which to work on, so I'll be trying to do that as well. And I'll be using my fun project as a reward - I'll only allow myself to work on it if I've met my daily goals.

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