Reading Through

I'm a little over 80% of the way through the read through on the book. It reads better than I thought it would. The plot points that got moved around had me worried that I was writing a train wreck. I feel better now. It feels so much more logical and natural in its progression than I'd feared. There are still things that need to be fixed, of course. The read through isn't for fixing any but the most minor of things like spelling and italicization and dialogue tweaks. Big fixes happen in the next phase.

I'm more encouraged than I thought I'd be. Going over the previous day's work every day instead of jumping into the day's writing gave the rough draft a certain level of polish that makes reading it through easier and makes me feel better about fixes.

One example of something that needs fixing is a scene in which the characters take a break to play a virtual reality fantasy game. The protagonist gets thrown into a dark area where her avatar can't see very well. Later after night falls she realizes that thanks to her character's elvish grandmother she can see in the dark. Hmm. Would it be more suspenseful if she could see in the dark or if she couldn't? I have to sacrifice something to make it consistent. Another thing that needs fixing is a scene in which a space ship is being chased. The pursuing ship drops back a little bit, which is confusing to the protagonist. There's a reason for it that's only revealed later. But. Regardless of the future explanation, does its dropping back drain too much tension from the scene? Does it feel too safe? I need to figure that out.

I need to think through some other things like the protagonist's confidence. It grows through the book. So, she starts out being nervous under pressure, but that diminishes deeper into the book. If the protagonist is worried, the reader is worried. Am I losing more than I'm gaining with that? The reason she's more confident is that her abilities are growing. Is becoming more bad to the bone enough to offset the tension that's lost when the character is not as nervous? I have to make sure it is.

If I work on it this weekend, the read through will be done and the fixing and polishing in full swing. When it's done, the plan is to let it rest at least thirty days. While it's resting, I need to work on the last B'vellah War book. On the side I need to be working on the plot outline for the middle grade trilogy.

Have a great weekend.

100% and Beyond

I finished the rough draft this week. I'd hoped to get it done by Monday at the latest, but it took until Wednesday. I spent a few minutes last night going over the final pages and fixing mistakes and such, as I usually do with the previous day's material. I went a little over the 80k word count goal I had, and that's okay. I'd kind of expected to. I've known that I was going to have to go back and fill in some descriptions of the environments. In some places I described things more. In some places I merely mentioned the name of the location.

Descriptions of people were similar. When certain characters first appeared, I spent some time on description but not so much later on. I probably need to add a few details here and there. None of it will take a long time. Then why not do that to begin with and save time later? For some things, mostly people, I did. However, in the beginning I didn't always have a firm visualization of a location, for instance. As the story progressed and characters visited the location more, the better I could picture it and the more details I could add. Using that, I can strengthen the original description of a locale.

After going over the previous day's work last night, I set the book aside and watched some television. I'm horribly behind on that. Part of figuring out a schedule that includes French and writing involved where to cut out time for writing. Television ended up getting cut, especially days when I was tired and words took forever to type.

The next step is to read through the book and see if it works. I know there are things I could've done differently. Are those things critical to the story? I hope not. I'm hoping it holds together and just needs minor changes. The scene in which the protagonist has dinner with her parents. Should I cut that? Maybe so. We'll see. If the read through goes well, the step after that is to go through fixing and polishing things. Dialogue, prose, descriptions, characterizations, etc. After that it'll be time to put it aside for at least thirty days so I can come back to it with "fresh eyes" afterward.

If the read through doesn't go well, I'm going to have to figure out how to fix the book. I'd like to sell it to a publisher if I can. That means it has to be perfect. Publishers' ideas of perfect are different from readers' ideas, so any changes would be for what I know publishers expect. The thirty days of letting it rest would come afterward. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. The silver lining to having to fix things this way is that it would make the story better overall.

Have a great weekend.

90% and Beyond

It wasn't a bad week on the writing front, and the week's not over. I made it to the 90% plot point and a little further. I said last week that it looked like I'd finish the rough draft during this week(July 1-7). Unless I run over the word count, which looks like a possibility, that estimate is on target. If I work on it this weekend, I could get it done on or before Monday. Otherwise, it would be on or before Wednesday.

After the rough draft is complete, the plan is to read through it to see if it feels like it works and probably make notes along the way for things that need attention in later stages. My outline did not survive contact with the keyboard, and I had to change some plot points to fit the story, which is good in a way. It means I didn't try to force the story to fit the outline. If I think it's working, the next step would be to go through it fixing and polishing and tweaking. That's something that gets done multiple times. I could do a pass focusing on dialogue and one focusing on prose and one focusing on description, etc. It's really important to write what you love to read. At some point I'd let it rest for at least 30 days and then look at it again with "fresh" eyes. From experience, I know 30 days isn't long enough, but it's an optimistic goal. If I'm in the middle of another rough draft, I'd want to let that deadline slip and be glad about it.

The middle grade series is looming on the horizon. But first, I need to finish the last book in the B'vellah War series. I'm estimated about three weeks or so to finish the rough draft for that. Then it's on to reading the complete book to see if I think it works. Then polishing and tweaking.

Part of my process for working on a rough draft is to go over yesterday's work and fix and polish as I read through it. At the end that saves a lot of work. If I'm typing too fast, I can leave out a word in a sentence. It's a lot easier to remember the word the next day than weeks or a couple of months later. There were a lot of ship name references in the book. It's amazing how many times I had to italicize them the next day.

As I mentioned a while ago, I spent a lot of time on plotting this book. It still wasn't enough, especially when plot points shifted around. I'm already thinking ahead for the middle grade series. I'm going to have to pre-think that series a lot. It's one that I hope to be able to sell to a publisher, but if it doesn't work that way, it's still going to be a solidly plotted work.

Have a great weekend.

75% and Beyond

Despite having a bad week in real life, I was able to beat 10k words again and pass the 75% plot point. I'm up to 65k words, which is over 80% through the rough draft. The week's still not over. During the next week, I should be past the 90% plot point. If nothing gets in the way, the rough draft should be finished some time in the first week of July.

It's been rainy this month. This week's been drier with lower temperatures. It was down in the 50s at least one night. It's closing in on July, and it's been chilly at night. I love it. Unfortunately, it's going to be a little warmer this week with lows in the upper 60s but only one day with thunderstorms.

 

I'm having terrible connection problems with Verizon today. For the past six weeks, I've had long periods on Saturday with no internet. Some Sundays it's been the same. It usually clears up around 7pm or 8pm. My guess is that they're working on 5G. I hope that's not being overly optimistic. I'd hate for this to be normal.

I have 4G LTE for internet. I don't live in NY. I get randomly routed through various cities. Atlanta is the closest major city, but my connection almost never goes through there.

Have a great weekend.

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.

Plotting Insight

It wasn't a bad week on the writing front. I didn't get as much done as I wanted, but I beat my 10k words per week goal. And the week isn't over. How long does it take to wash an elephant? I had to look that up. I never found a straight answer, but it seems to take about 30 minutes or maybe less. I had a character washing an elephant. On a spaceship. It can take too long to find hands-on information like that.

I'm a little over 2k words to the midpoint, and I've been thinking about plotting. I have a list of plot points and all that, but I've been wanting to come up with my own plotting method instead of relying on the 3-act formula. As I've mentioned before, a saggy middle(25-75%) is a common problem. As I've been getting closer and closer to 50%, I've been wondering if I've put enough work into the outline for the second half. I had to move the 25% plot point to the 37% mark in the first half.

While fretting about the plot, I thought about all those people with a drawer filled with the first halves of novels and how I didn't want to become one of those people. I had the thought that the first half always seems to be the easiest part of the book to write. That's when it hit me. What if I plotted the second half the same way as the first? It would be like having two halves with the second half being as easy as the first. Let's look at plot points for 3-act doing it that way.

0%    50%

12.5%    62%

25%    75%

37%    90%

50%    100%

I'm sorry these are double-spaced. Blogger messed with the formatting a while back, and I haven't seen any way to fix it. I need to dump them for that alone. Anyway, the plot points for both halves match up fairly well, thought they're not all equivalent. The 12.5% one is something that catalyzes the hero to action. The 62% one is the villain flexing his muscles. Nevertheless, the minor and major plot points are almost mirrors of each other. Maybe, instead of worrying about saggy middles and such, I should approach the second half the same way as the first with the difference being that the stakes get higher and higher toward the end.

It also occurred to me that I could break any book into thirds with each third being plotted the same way as the first half of a novel. The 3-act structure is in thirds already. However, I could plot the middle the same way I plotted halves the old way. From 25% to 75% could be its own book in a way. Whichever way I did it, no saggy middle worries.

Or I could use this as a basis for a try/fail cycle plot structure. I'm not a fan of the rigidity of the 3-act structure, and I like the idea of try/fail instead. Maybe I need to work out a hybrid model.

Well, I don't think I'm going to change horses in mid-stream on this project. I'll probably tweak the second half in a fine-tuning kind of way but no major overhaul. The middle grade trilogy project on the other hand would be a great place to experiment with plotting. When there's time for that after the B'vellah War series.

You see those authors who have dozens or scores of books in print. I bet they're using the same formula for each book and plugging in different characters and plot points. If I could work out my own system, I could do the same thing and increase my productivity.

Have a great weekend.

Free Lawn Mower

It was another good week on the writing front. I beat my 10k word goal and came in around 12k words. I also passed the 25% plot point. I'm a little concerned with pacing, but I won't know how it's going to read until later. I can speed it up or slow it down by editing things out or editing them in. Or it may not be a problem at all. I've read all kinds of books with all kinds of different pacing. Nevertheless, it's something I have my eye on. I believe, as I go along, the rhythm will fall into place naturally.

In general I'm using a 3-act structure, so I have major plot points at 25%, 50% and 75%. I also need minor plot points at 12.5%, 37%, 62% and 90%. On the other hand I could instead do a try/fail cycle and not obsess about the 3-act formula, which is after all a formula. I'm up to the 30% mark. The 37% minor plot point is coming up in about 5k more words, and I have a lot of space to fill with exciting things. The character is still reacting to the 25% plot point, but that can only last so long. I spent what I thought was a lot of time working on the plot before touching the keyboard. It's still not enough. My original 25% plot point had to be pushed back to the 37% plot point, assuming I don't use it before that.

As mentioned last week, the stuff between the 25% mark and the 75% mark is something a lot of writers have trouble with. I'm still worried about that and am focusing on it. This would be the perfect time to put on a smoking jacket, grab a pipe and go into the library and have a sit down for a think about how I'm going to make the gaps between the plot points rich and full. Alas, I don't have a pipe or a smoking jacket or a library. I don't even smoke. I'll have to sit down in a chair with a notepad.

I haven't been forthcoming with specifics about this project. I want to try to get an agent for it and sell it if I can. I plan to have more info later.

Free Lawn Mower

Monday, I left Walmart empty handed again after looking at battery-powered lawn mowers. They had them on sale for Memorial Day. The 20-in self-propelled one was $338 on sale. The normal ones were in the mid $200s. That's a lot for a lawn mower. My old one was $114 on Amazon. I've been looking for a long while, hoping for a good sale perhaps for Father's Day or end of summer. It just never happens, and now we have pandemic shortages and that stuck cargo ship complicating things. Store shelves are still partially empty here by the way. And that gas shortage that was is in the news the other day? Still going on this week.

On the way home from Walmart, I saw a lawn mower on the side of the road with a sign on it: "Free to a needy lawn! *Needs a new Battery." Battery-powered, you say? That's what I was looking for in Walmart. I couldn't stop then, but I was able to go back within the hour and look at it. It seemed to be in good shape.

It was a 21-in Craftsman V60. I've priced a lot of lawn mowers and guessed the battery would run between $130 and $150. Way cheaper than a new lawn mower. I took it home and charged the battery, which was almost full to begin with. I turned it on, and nothing happened. Uh, oh. First rule of computer network problems: Check connections. I re-seated the battery and tried again. It worked! And even better, it was self-propelled! It was close to dark. I ran it about five minutes. It worked great, but I knew 5 minutes likely wasn't long enough to see a battery problem.

I looked up the battery that came with it, a High Energy 7.5AH lithium ion. I've seen 5AH ones before, not 7.5. I became worried about the price. Then I couldn't find one anywhere. Suddenly, I could see why it had been on the side of the road. Supply chain disruptions? Perhaps so. I found a 2.5AH version for $149. Ouch. 2.5AH? Maybe for a weed trimmer. I found a 5AH version for $200, which is close to the price of a new lawn mower. It was starting to look like I had an 85.5 pound piece of recyclable metal.

The next evening I got the lawn mower out and starting mowing some heavy grass to see how long the battery would last. Almost 50 minutes later it was still running although getting tired. Over the two days, it ran 50 something minutes. The battery is rated for about 60 minutes. Conclusion: the battery is fine.

Somebody threw away and replaced a lawn mower with an MSRP of $499 that retailed for $374 at Lowes and about $300 on Amazon. The date on the battery is 2nd half of 2019. Thus, the lawn mower was probably purchased in late 2019 or some time in 2020.

This is a miracle that fulfilled a need.

Have a great weekend.