GOAL FOR THE DAY:
Think more about plotting, world building, and character development. Make a final decision what book LS00 will be about.
GOAL STATUS:
Completed!
Notes:
I didn't get much time to write today. Things at the day job (I work in IT) are hectic at the minute with pressing project deadlines and my wife has been really ill so I've been focusing in her and the kids a lot.
I think the best part about Chris's videos (and why you should really watch them if you ever try this), is that he showed how far he fell behind at certain points in his project. At times he wouldn't hit his word count and and one point he was over 10k words behind schedule. At times he was working on other writing tasks like plotting. At other times, life just took over. That's okay. It happens. And there will always be time to push a little harder a little further down the line. And before you know it, you've caught up.
Another thing that struck me was how much his word count success relied on his plotting. If his plotting wasn't as robust as it could have been his word count would start to drop off. When he built the plot up some more his word count shot through the roof again.
Many people are discovery writers, but I'm not one of them. Like Chris, I rely a lot on plotting my story, so this is something I will need to be mindful of.
I read Chris's reader magnet novella Planet Strider to get a rough idea of what my
I'm glad I did this as it challenged certain thoughts/misconceptions I had.
- The novella has to be long: Planet Strider is around 10k words. Technical this makes it a novellette. But there you go. In my mind I needed to write a 40k book. I need to work on the MVP mentality.
- The novella has to be complicated: Planet strider focuses on the events surrounding one character. It gives us some backstory, the character's conflict, tension and culminates in a battle that nicely leads into book 01. It is fairly bare bones but no less entertaining for it. In my head I was going to write about two different character and it was going to be a long drawn-out story. Lesson learned
These lessons caused me to completely rethink my ideas for the novella. I had intended on writing about Frank, one of the primary characters in book one. But the more I thought about it the harder it would be to make that backstory lead into book 01. It would require a complete novel to do it justice.
I came up with a completely new idea and would focus on Lady Fia, who isn't so much a main character in book 01 but features more in later books. I got really excited about this idea and jotted down some notes and I really look forward to start plotting it on Day 5. I won't be able to give it the time it deserves on Day 4.
It just goes to show, even though we want to exceed our expectations it's important to manage them first.
Cheers,
Killian