Tag Archives for chrysanthemum

writing goals: February

OKAY THEN.

This was buried at the bottom of a previous post, but it’s kinda big news. (In Gracetopia. Not like, “Cure Found for Cancer” big news, but like “What is Up with Grace” big news.)

The Project That Was Eating my Soul (referred to here as “BY”) has been officially shelved.

And I feel great.

I feel… free. I feel like I’ve been weighing myself down for the past year or so trying to make every word I write The Perfect Word so as not to waste three years of work. But that’s gone. There was a brief mourning process, but now? Now writing is a joy again instead of a task.

Because I am writing. In the past 48 hours I’ve written 7000 words in a new project. Yes, this is the Shiny New Idea (SNI) phase, but I’m hoping to keep up this momentum long enough that I get through the first draft without getting to the overthinking phase. (ie, I’m doing NaNo in February. Shorting myself 2 days. Sigh.) I mean, I’m not going to write 3500 words a day (wow just the idea is tiring) but I want to keep pushing forward.

Forward forward forward.

But back to BY for a minute. This manuscript isn’t entirely shelved. Which brings me to my writing goals for February, because I have 2 writing goals this month:

1. Work on BY for one hour a week (at least). I refuse to give up on this story entirely, but I refuse to let it own me. I’m now going to treat it as a purely academic writing exercise, working on the process of finishing something. It’s going to be sketchy, some sections might just be “then this happens and then this and this and okay next chapter.” Basically my goal for BY now is to get it “finished” enough that I could hand it to a beta reader and they’d have a complete story that made at least some sense. (I wouldn’t actually do that to someone.)

2. Work on Shiny New Idea for one hour a day (at least). This project’s code name is M!S! And I’m going to write it. YEAH.

Watch me go. vroooom.

~
Post edited on 2/4 to remove one errant apostrophe. Yes. I’m that person.

writing update 6/28/09

Chrysanthemum

current wordcount: 45,675
last week: 43,263
satisfied?: +2412 Yes! Still could do better, but considering that I wrote almost nothing last week/month, this is a major improvement.
comments: I’m rearranging some things and I think everything’s working a LOT better. I’ve switched the location of two major plot points. Crazy times!

This upcoming week is probably not going to be very productive. I’m going to be in D.C. Monday night and all of Tuesday, and then going up to Maine for the 4th. So maybe I will get a lot of work done in airports/on buses, but yeah that rarely happens. We’ll see.

writing update 6/23/09

I’ve put off last week’s update for basically as long as I could.

Chrysanthemum

current wordcount: 43,263
last week: 43,082
satisfied?: +181 hahahaha oh god grace. This is why I kept putting off this update, I was hoping to up that dreadful number. But no. ‘scuse me while I shoot myself.
comments: that +181 might be kind of misleading; it would be higher except I deleted a goodly chunk as I was writing another chunk. So. I think this week is going to be very editing/chop heavy, so next week’s numbers may also be unimpressive. But they *will* be higher, I swear.

writing update 6/14/09

This week’s stats.

Chrysanthemum (someday I am going to misspell this and it will be very embarrassing)
current wordcount: 43,082
last week’s wordcount: 40,190
satisfied?: so +2892. That’s pretty good, I guess, though it came from only 2 real writing sessions. Definitely need to write every day.
comments: I’m adding onto the beginning to make my female MC seem like less of a whiny brat. So the story is very easy in this place, b/c it’s very chronological and narrative and I always find beginnings “easy.” Or at least easy compared to some of the other sections. I predict that next week will be more of a slog as I finish this new beginning and get back into the meat of the story.

Writing update 6/8/09

I’ve decided to do a brief writing update post every week. Probably Sunday or Monday since I’ll usually do most of my writing over the weekend. Mostly this will be for me, to hold me accountable to… something. You? Myself? I mean, I don’t want to have any “woo-hoo I wrote 45 words this week!” posts, do I? That would be embarrassing.

So.

I have a couple of WIPs going on, but there’s one I’m concentrating most of my effort on. I will codename it… Chrysanthemum. Because I can.

Chrysanthemum
current wordcount: 40,190
last week’s wordcount: n/a
satisfied?: no, I’ve been going through a slump. snap out of it, grace.
comments: I spent a lot of time thinking about Chrys at work today, and I have some good ideas to move it forward. Getting to work now.