Hello everyone.
This week was more roller coaster than routine, but overall I’m coming away thinking it went pretty well. It definitely hammocked in the middle, but I think the tentpoles to start and finish the week made up for it.
The start of Labor Day weekend made for some light outlining, as my brother came up from the city on Saturday. I’ll be honest, and no knock on him, but I was more excited to see the 9 month old puppy that he brought up. I did manage to squeeze in some outlining before seeing him, which I felt was good practice for November when NaNoWriMo begins, and there will be days when I also won’t be able to just write to my heart’s content because life outside of writing will still be happening.
On Sunday I finished watching and taking notes on Death Note. This is a series that I love so much that I actually don’t want to peek behind the curtains and analyze it to see what makes it work and why it works so well (I think I’ve actively been avoiding YouTube videos analyzing it), but there was an aspect of the story that I wanted to get a better sense of for my own book.
I kept carrying that momentum through to Labor Day, doing more outlining in a day than I have since I started working on this project. I had been working on the plot run through from the perspective of a second antagonist for a few days, but on Monday, I just put my head down, pinned my ears back, and kept at it until I’d gone through the whole story from his perspective. While I was getting into their headspace as to their motivations in each chapter, I also see that I’m going to need to elaborate on what they’re specifically doing and talking about in each chapter, as what they talk about and how they talk are the way I’m going to give the reader a glimpse into their psyche at any one time.
After doing some good work over the 3 day weekend, I gave myself a break to watch our local baseball team. The plan had been to get right back to it the next day, and I started assigning small subplots to the minor characters who will appear in this story…until the power went out. It put up a valiant effort, kicking back on within a minute two or three times before it finally gave out for an hour. Not wanting to hunch over a notebook in the dark while illuminating the page with a poor light source, I gave up for the night. I then watched the same team play a doubleheader the next night after work, skipping outlining again.
Despite all that, after my workweek was done on Friday, I was back to some serious outlining. It wasn’t my longest stretch of outlining, but so far, it’s only been beat by my effort from Monday. I not only kept assigning subplots to characters, I actually came up with a whole backstory between a group of background characters and the main antagonist of the book. As always, I don’t know how much of the details will actually make its way into the novel, but the impact of this backstory will be present on some level as it will give shape to some of their decisions and interactions.
Lastly, on one of my morning walks, the title for this book finally hit me, and I think I’m going to be going with this (unless my editor, like with the original pimp name I had in Dig Down, tells me its terrible and that I need to come up with another one). So Worth the Wait was merely a placeholder, like I had kind of expected. The title I thought up is In the Maws and Claws, which I think is going to better illustrate the predicament that the protagonist is going to find themselves in.
Until next week.