62%

It was not a perfect week on the writing front, but I managed to surpass my 10k word count goal again. Ten thousand feels like a lot. If too many things happened during the week, I'd never be able to make that. However, it would probably average out over time if I had weeks with great word counts. I think 8k should be a minimum.

I hit the midpoint(40k words) of the current project and made it to just past the 62% minor plot point(49.6k words). Some of it was easy. Some of it was more of a struggle. I'm a natural pantser. Using plot points in a 3-act formula is something I'm still getting used to, even though I've been using it for several books now. Coming up with my own standard plot outline is something I simply must work out.

I spent a few minutes this week looking at my ideas for the middle grade trilogy. Every once in a while over time, I've thought about it during idle moments. Reading through my notes, I can see how the concept is coalescing in my brain. Some of the brainstorming ideas I wrote down clearly will not work. It's like that for every book. German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke(1800-1891), also known as Moltke the Elder, said, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." Today it's usually condensed as, No plan survives contact with the enemy. It's the same with my books. No story I come up with, no matter how well thought out or plotted or brainstormed, survives contact with the keyboard. There's always something that makes perfect sense ahead of time that doesn't make sense once I get in the world of the story. And that's not bad. It means the world is alive in my head at that point, and I'm seeing how it really works.

Going from talking about devising my own plotting strategy to talking about the middle grade project wasn't an accident. One of the struggles I have with using an outline is getting the word count per section right. In a minimum 80k-word novel, there's a lot of space to fill with things the reader will find interesting. Part of the purpose of the middle grade trilogy is practice at outlining and managing word counts. Since it's for younger readers, each book in the trilogy would be 30k to 35k words, which makes the whole project 90k to 105k words long.

In other words, it would take not much longer to do three of those than it does to do one regular novel. I think that's good practice without taking much time, and I could try to sell the whole trilogy at once. The goal is to take what I learn from it and bring it back into my regular novels. But that's after the B'vellah War series is done.

Switching from Blogger to something else is also something that needs to coalesce.

Have a great weekend.