Updates

A couple of things...

Most of them involve me not writing.

I know! Bad author! You should be writing!

Except it's really hard to write when you've got a migraine.  I had a migraine both yesterday and the day before yesterday, which, combined with the amount of things I need to be doing around the house at the moment, seem to be equalling no writing.  Sadness.

I got some writing down yesterday, which, if you follow my tumblr, you know that I was super brain dead.  As brain dead as I would have been if I'd just taken the 6 exams I'd previously written about.  Yep.  Fun times.  Stupid migraine.

Today, got the rest of that chapter finished with semi-new material.  New material to this part of the book.

We have gotten to the point where I'm moving large plot-points to a more logical order.  I think I will talk about that in-depth in another blog post.  But, so far, it's been one part copy-paste, two parts filling in the holes that I leave behind and create anew.  Woo.

This also means it's slower going, which is discouraging for me, who needs to have this done by June 30th, so I have something not-embarrassing to get five free copies out of from CreateSpace.

I also won't be writing for the next several days because of Phoenix Comic Con.  While that will be excellently fun and one of my friends has promised to introduce me to some really nice YA authors, I won't be writing, which is sad.

Sad writer not writing.  Sad.

Le sigh.

However, I am confident with my new timeline, now I just need to write it all out.

Appropriate Chapter Breaks

So, the first several drafts of this book didn't actually include chapters.  I had it organized into sections, and then I would give little line breaks in the text.  I'm fairly certain they were random in the first couple of drafts. Then, on the third, I tried to ensure that the breaks were at least logical.

For the fourth draft (the one I was working on back in November), I added chapters.  Given where I added the chapters, they were fairly logical, but my chapters ranged from being three pages long, to ten pages long. Which, is too much of a discrepancy, in my opinion.

Up until now with draft five, the chapter breaks have been fairly easy fixes (mostly just splitting longer chapters into two shorter ones).  Today, however, I ran into two chapters that needed to be three chapters between the original two, so I ended up spending quite a bit of time figuring out where the best (most natural) split was.

Also, now my primary editor is telling me to change up where some chapter breaks are.  I haven't looked too far into her suggestions, but she's probably got a point.  She may be finding more natural breaks where I was looking a lot at word-count and then second at naturalness.

Other big things that I was dealing with today was character motivation.  I have a bit of backstory for one character that I'm thinking of adding, but I'm not sure when to start incorporating it (if I add it at all).  I thought about incorporating it today, in those few chapters I was working on, but decided if I do choose to add it in, I can always do it at a later point because it makes the most sense.  So, things I filed under "I don't have to deal with it now, so I can move on."

Then, I had a moment where one of my characters surprised me.  I can't really say much about this particular instance in which she surprised me.  It would take too much explaining for one line and the significance is lost out of context, anyway.  Granted, Alice is surprising sometimes.  And amusing.  And I love her.

On a completely different note, I'm fairly certain there was more I wanted to say, but I've forgotten by now.  Sometimes, I think about liveblogging my writing, but blogger's not really set up for liveblogging, and besides, if I take the time to blog, I lose the groove of writing.  Le sigh.

That's all for now!

Character Development

Well, the past few days have been rather busy, given graduations and traveling and whatnot.  Back in the writing groove, however,  I want to be a few chapters ahead of where I am now, but, at the same time, I'm putting in quality time.  And quality time is better than quantity time.

Currently, the biggest things I'm working on is appropriate character development.  I have a character who needs to be more annoying who isn't at the moment, and a character who is coming across as flat who shouldn't.  She needs to be more annoying given the amount of talk about her that she's annoying.  He needs to just have some sort of depth.

Part of this is coming from the fact that I know she's annoying and I know he's got depth, but that's mostly because I've written two more books after this one and I know where they end up.  But they need to show some of that development now--not all, they have to have some growing to do--but some.

Fun times, really.

Loads of progress!

Today has been a day evening out chapter length.  This is a process with a multitude of variables. First, there's adding more to the shorter chapters in the way of description, as well as taking away from the longer chapters that simply have unnecessary information.  Then there's a matter of just splitting the super long chapters into two shorter, more even-length chapters.  At some point, there will probably be some combining of chapters, and simply reassigning chapter breaks, but that will come later.

Today, I have also been expanding upon one of Kat's (protagonist, if you've forgotten or I haven't mentioned) character traits.  I'm actually amplifying it to be a flaw at this point.  It's a power she doesn't entirely know how to control, and so while beneficial sometimes, it can backfire others.  Woo! It's an attempt to make her more interesting.

Plus, last night I was working on a thing to make William less angsty.  He needs to get over that.  Seriously.  It's better now for the moment.  There are other scenes I will have to work with him on with this as well.

I think that's all for the moment.

Ciao!

Seemingly Not Much Progress

Today's work has been a lot of taking out unnecessary information and trying to make sure I'm not giving too much away at the beginning.  Thus, I spent a lot of time deliberating on how to handle certain scenes and my page count doesn't seem to be showing much of an improvement.  HOWEVER, this is part of the writing process.  Woo.

I also need new names for Vamprism, the moon off of Evalchi Springs, and potentially Kat's dad...

Le sigh.

EDIT

So... still no new names.  Mostly just fixing stylistic stuff and then moving little things around to a better order.  Nothing terribly exiting today... but I have 3 chapters done!

Haha!!

I'm alive again!  School 'bout nearly killed me though!

Anyway, started editing (rewriting) again today.  Doubled what I'd started months ago and then had to set down because school happened.  But now school's over and while yes, I have summer reading and a job, there will be time in the day to get these rewrites done.

My goal is to do this in a month (hopefully not too much more.)  I absolutely HAVE to have it done by June 30th so I can get nice and shiny 5 free copies off of create space because I won nano all those months ago.

Currently, things I'm working on is being more descriptive as well as makings sure the main characters' motivations are clear.

Expect more updates soon!