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Hello everyone!

The first week of NaNoWriMo is in the books. So far, I’ve gotten the first three chapters of Between the Maws and Claws drafted, and have begun working on the fourth.

It’s been slow going most days that I’ve been writing. I’d say my average for writing a page is about thirty minutes, and my pace sometimes has been nearly double that.

This is usual for me when I’m starting any new manuscript. I’ve got pages of notes for where I want to take the story, but those are mostly bullet points, maybe a paragraph here or there serving as a reminder to myself why some aspects are going to be integral to the story, either here or down the line. Putting it all together in a cohesive narrative (that’s hopefully entertaining) still takes an effort to get going.

Day one took me about fifty minutes to write, and a lot of that was gaps just spent staring at the screen, thinking about how to incorporate the next note. I may have even cheated a little with more dialogue than I intended, so the first chapter might get hacked to bits by a machete before it ever reaches another pair of eyeballs.

A couple times, I did hit that usual pace of thirty minutes without the crutch of dialogue, and felt like I was starting to find a rhythm. But then I reached one of my long writing days, and was back to my long pauses where a roadmap of where to go would’ve been useful.

I’ve also been making lots of notes as I’ve been writing for revisions I already want to make in the second draft. Most of the notes have to do with the atmosphere I’m trying to capture within the chapters, feeling that they’re lacking and that I want to punch them up a little. There’s also the introduction of a plot point that I want to occur a little sooner than it did. This was due to me having it towards the end of my notes for one of the chapters. When I’d written the notes, I’d realized I’d wanted it in there sooner than I’d listed it, and when I started to actually write, I’d followed my notes, including the mistake in the ordering of these events. This is why you can’t just blindly follow your notes. If there’s a mistake in them, you’re just compounding it.

Although it’s a slow start, I’m not discouraged by it. The beginning of a first draft is always a hurdle for me. It’s my first time really seeing how the characters behave in the narrative, the first time polishing them from the rough ideas of who they are and their motivations so that they fit into the world I created. It’s always a feeling out process until I start to get comfortable, both with them and the world they live in.

Having already started on chapter 4, I’m starting to feel that comfort. Incidentally, this is also when the main antagonist has not only been teased, but is making his first appearance, which has already started to open up the story so that the main character doesn’t have to shoulder the entire load. Things are starting to pick up, and I can feel it in my writing as well.

I expect I’ll start to see that momentum in the next week.

Until next time.

Hello everyone!

It’s finally here! National Novel Writing Month, the writing competition to try to finish a complete book or 50,000 words within the month of November.

This is my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. My first was in 2019, and I’ve chosen NaNoWriMo as the time of year to write the first drafts of my novels ever since. It’s fit my release schedule very well, as so far all three of my books have had publication dates in January, giving me a little over a year to write the book, go through a series of edits, and get everything in line to meet my release window.

The first year was a bit of a challenge because it was the second novel I was writing in 2019. I’d started writing Lock the Doors at the start of 2019 because I’d wanted (and kind of needed) to complete a story to release in 2020, and the manuscript I’d drafted in 2018 wasn’t it. While I was going through the process of getting Lock the Doors ready for release, I was also outlining I’m Not my Father leading up to writing it for my first NaNoWriMo. I knew I was pushing myself to finish a second novel within a year, but it was worth it to me to get onto the schedule I wanted going forward.

It’s a fun challenge, and honestly, one that I’ve never been successful at, always falling short of the word count, as well as just missing finishing the first draft by a few days. It’s always okay though to me. I feel the real point of NaNoWriMo is to stimulate writing, and the fact that I’ve always finished the manuscript, even after the month ended, has always made me feel like the competition was a success.

So after months of brainstorming ideas, and then what felt like an endless outlining process, how much did I end up writing on the first day of NaNo?

One page.

500 words exactly.

It’s not much, in fact it’s less than one third of what my daily average should be to reach the 50k goal. And to me, the day was a success.

Why? When I’ve been working out the details of what’s going to happen in the story for months, to the point where I have notes to piece together the story inside and out, why is such a low page and word count a success to me?

Because despite how much time I’ve already spent working out the story in my head and in my notebooks, there is still such a long journey ahead of me. I feel a big part of writing, and a reason why so many hopefuls get discouraged is because they’re unable to keep up the momentum of the writing process. I can see aspiring authors getting off to hot starts, but once they experience a slowdown, and they’re not keeping the same quick pace, that momentum starts swinging the other way and sadly, great original ideas start to gather cobwebs.

So to battle that momentum, I always start my first day of writing with a very attainable goal. One page. Thirty to sixty minutes set aside to convert my notes into one full page. It’s an easy win, and once I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ve got this mini success I can point to when I sit down to write the next day, when I push myself to write a little bit more.

Until next week.

Hello everyone!

We’ve almost made it! We’re down to the final full week of outlining. This whole week, I’ve been thinking how crazy it is that NaNoWriMo is so close to starting and I’m about to start actually writing a new story.

I really want to move on from the outlining into actually writing, and yet this whole week, thoughts have been creeping in that I’m still not ready. My outlining sessions have been on the short side all week as I’m trying to wrap up some last details of where certain tidbits of information are going to be learned in the story, and there isn’t the need to go through an entire run down of the plot as I’ve been doing for most of the past 3 months.

I’ve also been swamped at work, which has taken up most of my attention and focus this past week. Ideally, in addition to wrapping up these last details in the outline, I’d’ve been able to keep my mind relatively clear and with as little stress as possible. While it didn’t work out that way, I think it’ll still be fine, but I do believe a positive mindset can have a beneficial impact on writing, especially when you’re in the early stages of a new project.

I also always believe there’s always a bit of trepidation before a writer starts writing a new manuscript. So, I feel this feeling of cold feet was inevitable, and that these other factors are just amplifying a feeling that’s naturally going to be there.

Despite all that, I’m confident in progressing through NaNoWriMo (still crazy it starts in TWO days!) and at the very least getting close to my goal, if not achieving it. My outlining this week was short, but I do believe I’ve got a better sense of where information is going to be teased throughout the story now. I also found more spots where I can illustrate examples of the personalities and characteristics of the main characters, and as I wrote in an earlier post, any time aspects of your story can compliment one another, its a good sign.

So in these last couple of days before November, I’m going to continue outlining, short as it may end up being, firming up the foundation of my notes for this manuscript. As with the past week, there’s not much more I’m really going to be able to add without actually writing.

And in two days….

It begins.

See you next week.

Hello everyone!

Outlining went very well this week. I wrote detailed outlines through part four of Maws and Claws and have started work on the final section of the manuscript. Although I knew that part four was going to consist of quick chapters before a major event to cap off this act, I feel like you’d never know it by looking at the outline. Even though I’ve been brainstorming ideas for three months now, I’m still surprised by how much is going to be contained in each chapter. Sometimes I’m still jotting notes in the margins because new things are still coming to me that I want to include when I write the first draft.

Although we’re coming to the end of outlining, there’s still a lot to do. One thing I noticed is that I’m sometimes just including mention of a subplot in the chapters, and not actually expanding on how this subplot will be progressing through the story. Including it in the notes is merely a placeholder, a reminder that I still need to flesh this out. My work is still cut out for me, and this subplot (and any others I might find when reviewing the detailed outline) is going to be my focus for the coming week.

We’re also arriving at the first deadline of the script: wrapping up outlining.

What’s bringing on this deadline? When I looked at the calendar this week, I saw that we’re only weeks away from November. For those that don’t know, November is the month of NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. It is a writing competition against procrastination to  write either an entire book or 50,000 words in a single month.

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo the last two years, and was planning on writing the first draft of In the Maws and Claws during the month. This means that next week’s blog will be the last on outlining, and the focus will then shift to actually writing the story.

A nervous excitement is growing. I’ve wanted to get through the outlining process so that I could move on to the next step of actually writing the manuscript, but needed the extensive outlining to feel comfortable to actually sit down and begin. Now that I’m coming up to the doorstep of NaNoWriMo, all the things that are still lacking are jumping out at me, demanding I address them before I can start the first draft.

While this is a little daunting, I know that I’ll only be starting work on the first draft, one of many. So while I’ll still want to address these issues as soon as possible, I’m confident each draft will polish the rough edges more and more until these issues are fixed and the manuscript gets to the place it needs to be.

Until next time.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to another week of the outlining process for In the Maws and Claws. I felt it was another good week in the process.

As I was breaking down what was going to happen in the chapters in detail, I noticed that although the chapters still feel like they’ll be short (by which I mean that when it’s published, its not going to be like 15 to 20 pages to get through them, probably more like 10 or even less), there is still a lot of information that is going to be packed into each one of them. 

I also felt that these chapters are really going to open up the book a lot. Last week, I mentioned that after finishing part one, I thought it would play out well that the reader would get some time to focus solely on the main character before diving into the rest of the characters. The reason for that was because there are plenty of characters that play a major role in this manuscript, each one having a lot to unpack about them.

While I did feel that the reader would benefit from knowing and understanding the protagonist first, the challenge was then on me to bridge the story from where it’s starting to where I want it to go. It’s still going to be a process from it’s current state in the outlining process through the numerous edits that will follow, but I’m feeling good that I’ve transitioned the story from the main character to now encompass the antagonists and other characters that shape the story.

Another aspect that I felt good about this week was the chapter variety. I think readers can tell from my stories that I like to keep the plot moving. I want the pacing to feel crisp, and this can sometimes be a challenge when the story needs to relay information to the reader to set up future events. I feel stories can easily stagnate here.

I’d done something similar for I’m Not My Father. It’s not a thriller, like the rest of my books have been, and I wanted the reader to constantly be finding out something new about the small town murder twenty five years prior, as well as aspects of Cal’s life. To try and keep things fresh for the reader, locations changed from chapter to chapter, characters were doing something new, and new characters were introduced and interacted with throughout so that the reader was experiencing a story rather then a novelized checklist of relevant information.

One of the things I’ve been doing while outlining Maws is describing the intended atmosphere in each chapter. There’ve been a lot of benefits to this. I’ve been able to see if the story is being built properly, or if there are issues with the flow. If an act of the book starts out dread-ridden, but the rest of the act is calm and tensionless, I can spot it easier and ask myself if this was my intention. I can ask myself what I can do to start building a pressure cooker until the next big moment in the book. 

This came into play at the end of act two. I think what I initially had down for what happened in the final chapter of this section fell into the dreaded pitfall of stagnation. While what happens sets up the rest of the book, it boils down to the protagonist talking to the antagonist. There was a hint of agency to why the protagonist had to talk to them, but by seeing the the atmosphere was kind of blah, I added urgency to the scene, that not only do they have to talk to their enemy, they’re also racing a kind of ticking clock. Because I needed something to create that urgency, it allowed me to lace the scene with hints and reminders about the other characters and subplots I want in the story, as I believe this all sets up later events that will hopefully keep building on one another to the finale. So I think it’s a great sign that changes that I’m making in the outlining process are complimenting other aspects that I want to have in the book.

Until next week.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to another week of the outlining process for my next book. I know that this might all sound endless (sometimes it certainly feels that way when that’s all I’ve been blogging about), but it’s amazing to think that we’re coming to the end of it as NaNoWriMo is just a few weeks away.

Despite this being yet another week of outlining, there always seems to be something new to note. I got through the first act of the book providing detailed outlines of each chapter. At first, this seemed like I was just rehashing my old notes, writing them down again, maybe added a few additional things, but the changes all seemed minimal. As I worked my way through part one, I saw why that was the case. The first few chapters mainly focus on the main character as they navigate through the world of the book. I’m setting up other characters and aspects of the world, but for the most part, its all the main character. For this reason, I was really only pulling notes from their rundown, and not much was needed from the other characters. 

It isn’t until the reader gets a few chapters in that the main antagonist is introduced, and this is where I started to need to compile notes from another character. As I finished up part one and moved into part two, I felt that the story started to open up even more, and I needed to refer to all of the character plot rundowns to gather notes to include in this more detailed outline.

I think this is a really positive development, and is going to make for an enjoyable experience for the reader. From the outline, the reader will have time to get acquainted with our main character, their situation and motivations, before being exposed to the story at large, the main antagonist and the main conflict of the book. Once that’s established, the story will continue to unfold, building on what I took the time to establish in those early, intimate chapters that focused on the protagonist.

I also started to get a sense of how long some of these chapters are going to be. The reason I outline so extensively is so when I get down to writing, I can get as efficient in storytelling as possible. This really started with Dig Down, where I wanted the reader to feel Rob was jumping from one sizzling frying pan to another as he was trying to escape multiple assassins, and because I didn’t want there to be a sag in the pacing, his conversations with Preston had to be just as economical in doling out information before moving on. 

I don’t want to bog the story down with irrelevant dialogue, or subplots and details that serve no purpose. If it’s in the book, I want there to be a reason why, whether it’s essential to the plot, establishes the tone or atmosphere of the book, a crucial detail about the world, fleshes out the character, what have you.

I’m early into part two of the book, but I see already that there’s the chance to convey a lot of information about the atmosphere of the story told by the actions of the characters as they’re driving the plot forward to where it needs to go. The beginning of this act will be coming off a crazy sequence that ends part one, and so by keeping the chapters crisp, while still delivering a lot of key information, I hope that this pace will keep the reader’s attention as the story navigates into what I have waiting for it later.

Until next time.