Themeattics

You need to have faith in yourself. Be brave and take risks. You don’t have to have it all figured out to move forward.

Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Look there! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s another throwaway post!

With family in town, a baseball game for my youngest, the Houston Whiskey Social, and a day’s worth of NaNo to do, I figure it’s in my best interests to keep this thing short and that’s just what I’ll be doing.

Well, the first week of NaNo is coming to an end. By the end of the day, I’m required to have just over ten thousand words completed for Catalyst. And I will. It’s… well, it certainly hasn’t been easy. I’m rusty when it comes to producing new, free-form content and I can already identify the holes in my outlining process, but all that said I’m still getting it done. Is it quality work? Eh. It’s passable. But NaNo isn’t about pumping out auspicious prose, it’s about hurling creative mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Things sure are sticky, I can say that much.

I’ve found that each step I take across all my recent writing endeavors has been a learning process in one way or another. With NaNo, it’s twofold. One is learning how to POV hop again. I’ve been invested in Residuum for several years at this point, and that’s been a single-POV story, so now that I’m back to jumping between four I need to be sure I’m wriggling my way into people’s heads. On top of that, particularly at the start of the book, I’m investing in bigger chapters so that I can give the reader a heavy dose of each character in their normal world. At the onset, these characters are relatively separated geographically and/or professionally, so giving each a large block of time seemed the best option. This is a pretty big deviation from my norm. I tend to keep chapters somewhere around twenty-five hundred to three-thousand words, and this time around I’m doubling that.

The second learning process is one that I’ve started here, and that’s being fine with a lack of editing. Now, unlike here where I don’t go back at all, I am guilty of doing a little chopping here and there for NaNo. I know, it’s counteracting my word count to redo things, but sometimes garbage just has to be tossed out. It hasn’t hurt too bad yet, so that’s just gonna keep happening.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that, in forcing myself to keep this pace (and not allowing myself to go over two-thousand words for my own sanity), I spend the start of the next day thinking about what I made and what could be added to improve, which leads to the first little while of my day’s writing session being that editing with an eye toward adding. This is new thing, but it might also just be borne from finally only having one thing to focus on. Either way, I’m a fan of it.

Alright, well, I’m gonna cut it here. Stealing time from the family. You and me, we’ll catch up next week.