I know, I know, I’m a little late on the February blog post. I also don’t have amazing news on book 2 progress either, unfortunately…
BAD NEWS
So I started the first draft of book 2 in mid to late January. I got about three chapters in pretty quick and then stalled just a bit. I’m not entirely sure why, other than life being full of distractions and other important responsibilities. However, I decided about a week and a half ago that I would try to institute my 5,000 words per week goal like I had for book 1 last year. Looking back, that’s a pretty intense goal for someone who has a non-writing full time job and two little kids, but I was pretty confident I could get it done.
As you can tell from the first paragraph of this post, it has not shaped up like I wanted…
See, I hadn’t fully realized just how busy February gets in my industry and how little actual free time I would have, especially winding down to the end of the month. I’ve had to work late quite a few days this past week or so to hit some deadlines and that, naturally, has left me exhausted mentally and physically. I’ve been able to get SOME writing done (I’m halfway through chapter 6, thank you), but it’s not the 5,000 words per week that I wanted. I’m still playing catch up and I’ll have to adjust some of the numbers for the weeks moving forward. But it’s not ALL bad!
GOOD NEWS
With the end of February fast approaching, I’m thinking I’ll have a bit more time to focus on drafting book 2 moving in to March. That’s good news, right!?
In addition to that, I also decided to branch out a bit on my organization for this series as a whole. If you’ve never heard of the program called Campfire, you should check it out. I decided to test out their new web-based program called Campfire Blaze. Essentially, it’s a way to organize not only the actual manuscript, but all of the world building for the series. I can input every single character, their physical description, their relationships with other people, their story arcs. I can organize the timeline, set out all the creatures, map locations, religions, cultural settings, etc. and I’ll be able to directly link to those entries from the text of the book. If I forget what color eyes a character has, click on their name and their entry pops up. If I forget where a city is located compared to another, click on the city in the text and it’ll pop up.
I’ve only recently started playing around with Campfire Blaze, but I’m pretty excited by it so far. The only problem is that I have to take all my notes I was keeping track of in OneNote and Word and put them in to Blaze (which, while not extensive, is quite a bit of work). In the long run, I know it will help me a ton, but it will probably push my word count goals a little further out as well. The best part is, I won’t have to take as much time to look up info on characters, chapter outline plot points, or anything like that when I have access to it right there within the program! I think it will help keep me organized.
Anyway, that’s basically it for this month. I have another week or so of crunch time for work and then I should hopefully not require so many late nights cutting in to writing time (and family time, for that matter). I’m hoping my mental exhaustion will clear up a bit when I have more time to focus.
Stay tuned for more!