Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Longest Week Ever

(Christine guiltily peeks around and blows a breath on the thin layer of dust that's settled on her blog ... )

Hello! Sorry I've been MIA ... not a lot of writing news to report because I haven't been doing much writing. I've been really restless while trying to get over a cold and ... just counting down the hours till Christmas vacation (3 more days). For kids, the night before Christmas is the longest night of the year. For us adults (or pretend aduts), the week before no work is the longest of all.

Along with the normal dreams of sugar plums, I've also been dreaming about hours dedicated to The Unicorn Tamer. In my dream, I'm sitting all cozy by the sparkling Christmas tree, with a Starbucks gingerbread white chocolate mocha, and all my edits and re-writes are easy and brilliant. Ha! I wish! All daydreams aside, I am honestly looking forward to having the time to dedicate to my writing. I know it won't be smooth sailing ... but I really want to re-write the partial portion of my manuscript and fix the glaring holes!

I really don't have an excuse for NOT writing though, so I'm really going to try and at least work on Fluffy everyday (Fluffy is the code name for my untitled, YA Urban Fantasy, btw). If I want to finish Fluffy by February or March, I've got to get my butt in gear. So, for encouragement, here's my shiny new word count progress bar for Fluffy:



7177 / 60000 words. 12% done!

I think I'll try and write an outline today. I never liked writing outlines in high school or college ... they always felt like a waste of time to me. Why spend an hour writing an outline when you can spend an hour writing the meat? However, over the past couple years, I've finally found a worthy use for an outline: novel writing. In case you're wondering, I write it out in list form and mark each "event" or "scene" with numbers and do it on a chapter by chapter basis. For example:

Chapter 15 - Title of Chapter
1. Protagonist recovers/reacts to the end of Chapter 14
2. Protagonist meets side-kick and they don't get along
3. Side-kick promises Protagonist something shiny and our hero reluctantly follows him to Hades

I know it's not Christmas yet, but I wanted to wish the few of you who do follow this blog a Happy Holidays! I'm thankful for each and every one of you. I'm working on my online presence in the writing community and am even looking for some critique partners so hopefully ... I'll grow my blog friends base. But thank you, yes you, who come to read my ramblings on this scary hard adventure. Heart!

1 comment:

Jill Wheeler said...

Hee. One of my students gave me crap about having them write an outline today. I told her it's my job to show them lots of ways to write, and this would be helpful to some people, even if she didn't like it. I find outlines very helpful.