Chapter Three is complete XD

For the last three days, I've added my writing goals to my daily agenda. Every day I've pushed myself to write at least 500 words. That sounds like a small goal right?

It is! And that's the beauty of it!

I've been able to reach my goal every day with a little more words as icing on the top. Combine that with "the instant cure for writer's block," and BAM! I've finished another chapter of my NaNo novel!

Do you know how nice it is, to actually see progress like that?
And putting a beautiful checkmark next to that goal in my agenda is even more satisfying :)

I've found that by setting these smaller writing goals, I've actually written more. I've worked on pieces from chapter 4 and 5 as well - both of them are halfway done.

I believe I officially started my rewrite of my NaNo first draft in the middle of January. So to date, I have written around  19,000 words  for Act One. I still haven't updated Scrivener for all the chapters yet, but I kinda like working with smaller steps. Finishing all nine chapters of the story "introduction" is going to be a big accomplishment that I'm going to enjoy. 

Only three more days to February, where the "Writing Time Challenge" will begin! I feel pretty confident for writing everyday, especially since recently I've been waking up early and getting plenty of coffee. I don't know what kind of goals I'll reach at the end of next month, but I know I'll have more words than I started with. It would be SUPER AMAZING to finish Act one, so I'll keep my fingers crossed for that. 

Give me a shout-out if you'd like to participate in the February challenge. All writers are welcome!

Finished the new chapter two!

Woo-hoo! I completed another milestone today with the revised outline of my NaNo novel:  the new chapter two is written! Yes it's a first draft, filled with some bricks of description and slightly less-than-interesting dialog choices, but it is COMPLETE!

It is so satisfying to finish something. Especially in scrivener, where I can visually change my label status from "To do" into "First Draft"! I took a screenshot to commemorate my awesome achievement (which probably only I'm excited about right now) :D

The rest of my chapters have my outline and bullet points pasted inside of them. I'm even keeping as much of my NaNo text as I can and pasting it back into the new scrivener project. So I'm hoping that my progress will continue into Chapter three, and my process of rewriting my first draft continues at a good pace. 

For today, I owe most of my progress to this Youtube video: How to cure writer's block!
Maybe it will inspire you as well :D

Have a great Sunday with your writing, peoples of the planet!

Looking forward to February!

~ * ~ Fun with Scrivener ~ * ~

During the last couple days, I've taken some time to really investigate the features of Scrivener and play around with how things in my story could be organized. Whether this happened because I had writers block and simply stared at the screen too long...ahem.

Anyway, yesterday I played around with the custom metadata settings. Labels, more specifically. I made two new labels called "Jason Scene" (I chose orange) and "Shiri Scene" (purple!) My two main characters. Using Scrivener's cool chapter - file - document hierarchy, I labeled each scene within a chapter for the character POV.

When I click on a chapter and go into corkboard mode, now I have color-coded index cards. It was easy to see which character would own each scene. This was a nice organizational tool for me!

At the end, I could make sure that my main characters were split evenly between scenes in a chapter, and make sure they weren't talking over each other. I made sure that I only change characters once during a chapter. The start of a new chapter could also change the character.

Again I'm still working with Act One - Story introduction (before characters enter the "new world.")
So far this has been easy and I like the way it flows together. This is the longest time that I've STAYED happy with my outline and novel structure. Usually I start to hate it a couple days after I declared it perfect and final. But this time, I have no more second-guessing. That's a great feeling!

~ * ~ NEW GOALS ~ * ~

I really miss the rush of NaNo. I don't know how, but that event kept me super motivated to write on my novel everyday and to keep that goal in my mind at all times. December and January have been...slacking, to say the least.

That's why I'm joining up with my writing buddy to attack February with a new writing objective! Instead of doing an event that's based on word-count, we will use next month to set some "writing time" goals.
The main objective is to write 3 hours every day - if we start to slack, be super-productive on the weekends!

I even found a cool little widget that can you can count-up the hours we spend writing. It will take some manual adjustment, but would still be fun to use. If anyone wants to make their own meter, just let me know and I can help you put it on your blog. I used Critique Circle to make it.

Check it out on the left side of this blog page! →

I am getting more excited about this idea! Word counts aren't so important at this point, since we know our stories and what needs to be editing. Now we just need the time (and motivation) to continue onward!

The new chapter one

I actually feel quite accomplished today. I have officially finished my NEW chapter one!
It now introduces both my main characters, with physical descriptions included. In re-reading my first NaNo draft, I had absolutely *no* descriptions of my characters. How did I miss that, exactly?

I'm also more satisfied with the world-building I was able to do in the first chapter. This time around, since I'm using two characters, I was able to describe the main city of the novel and the surrounding environment. Hopefully the reader will get a nice image in their head of what the world looks like, time frame, and level of technology.

The last thing - I also hint at a conflict or inciting incident within the middle of the chapter. It weaves together multiple characters, subplots, and questions about the world waiting to be addressed in Chapter Two. Overall, I'm really happy at the new draft!

I do want to try something different with this draft. During NaNo, I actually went over my writing a lot each day so that a portion of it would be good enough to post on my blog. I thought it would be cool to share snippets of my story with the world! However, I put so much effort into cleaning up those dialog pieces that I severely slowed myself down from finishing the overall book.

With this draft, I won't concern myself with making it "reader-ready." All I want to do is write THE WHOLE BOOK first. Then I'll use the technique of more drafts to fill in the blanks

• The second draft will be filling in missing dialog, character actions and emotions, and more world-building.
• The third draft will be the start of real editing: removing passive voice, create good sentence structure, take out the adverbs, etc. 

With these drafts in mind, it was a lot less pressure to just "write" my chapter, and even more satisfying to finish it. Now it's time for a coffee break with butter cookies. De-lish!

January writing updates!

Looking at my last blog post kinda makes me smile. Ahh if only all the days between January 5 and now had actually been "official" writing days....who knows how much extra text I could have written?

Just for funsies, let's go on a time-line of adventure for my novel.

January 5 - I actually did start writing again! Starting experimenting with my female protagonist and it was super fun. ALSO!!! I wish I reported it sooner, but I totally got my NaNo Winner's shirt in the mail!!! CHECK ME OUT :D

January 9 - After more research and watching other writing Youtube vids, I still decided to keep my one, original male protagonist. I am a novice writer, who am I kidding? TWO MC?? I somehow convinced myself I'm totally not talented enough to pull that off.

Later in the day, I printed out my novel outline (which I have been refining and adding two over the last 6 weeks). I was proud of it! And so, nervously, I gave it to my fiance to read. We had gone out to our regular restaurant and had a good 15 minutes before our food to come. He started to read and I sat there in silence, twiddling my thumbs.

After he was done, he looked up and smiled. He liked the story and thought the overall plot was excited. I felt a "but" coming on, but he didn't say anything. So I asked, "did you see any problems or have any questions about the story?" He wrinkled his eyebrows and admitted there were a couple things confusing him.

What he said had a profound impact on my story. In a way, I had built the culture in my world about women and men having specific roles in society. Within a world that was dying and the human population is dangerously low. My fiance said that everyone would be more concerned with survival and share an equal role, an equal job to do. That. made. so much. sense.

In an effort to make an "interesting fantasy world," I totally made a culture that was unbelievable and severely limited the possibilities of my storytelling. After his comments, I went back to world-building to fix those mistakes.

January 12 - My outline had been fixed, filled with new events and character reactions to fit the new culture I've created. Those changes paved the way, naturally, to having my two MCs have a role in each chapter. I actually hit two birds with one stone!

January...err...yesterday and today - Started a brand new scrivener project with my new outline and started fresh with writing. This time, instead of setting up the whole project at once, I'll make small goals for myself. First I will work on Chapters 1 -9 (Act 1). When that is complete, I'll set up the next act in Scrivener to continue. I thought that would be fun - it's like tricking myself into thinking the project is new somehow and growing, so I don't get bored with it.

Today I've almost finished my new Chapter one - it starts out introducing my female MC named "Shiri" and ends with a scene from my male MC Jason. Thus they will each have facetime in each chapter from this point forward!

It makes me realize that NaNoWriMo is an amazing kick in the butt to start writing, but unless you are a seasoned pro, it definitely takes a lot longer than one month (or a couple) to successfully write a first draft. And now, I'm perfectly happy to accept that I can take all the time I need. There's no real rush.

First official working day of 2015!

Woo-hoo! Time to shove your rolly chair up to the computer and put those fingers to the keys, because this is the first Monday of the new year! It's back to work for me and bigillions of other sad saps across the globe. It will be hard to change lazy habits into productive ones, but here's a big HOLLA to those of you that have taken the first step.

As far as writing goes, I've been experimenting with a new possibility over the weekend: changing my main character. Gasp! I have a guy and a girl that are really close to my heart. My first draft wrote the story from Jason's point of view. I liked how the story went, but at some points I lost focus with his emotions. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't really know him yet, or ...what. The last couple days I wrote some paragraphs coming from Shiri's point of view, and I found it a lot of fun to write!

This is the main problem though: there are distinct scenes in the story where each character is alone or separated from the group. And later, I wanted to focus on a new relationship between Jason and a new girl that is added to their group.

What to do...

I believe my confusion still stems from wrapping my head around the difference between omniscient and limited viewpoints. It seems the discussion about defining each one is so broad and stretched out, that many writing styles could fit into either category. Is omniscient just an all-seeing narrator, or is it more than that?

Based on my gut feeling about third-person limited, it looks like I can successfully change character viewpoints at the end of a scene or chapter. If this is indeed true, then I could write the story using any main character! That would solve my problem!

It's still rather scary to be undecided on my style. Now that I'm officially starting my second draft, I wanted to have all the details of style and plot figured out. My first draft could mostly be summarized like this NaNo blog post.

But  guess you can only discuss and think about it for so long. It's time to act! So here comes the start of another writing draft for my novel, this time with all the characters, more conflicts, and an actual ending.

Good luck to everyone out there in their drafting and editing of 2015 novels!!

Happy New Year!

Ahh this is the best way to bring in 2015 - sleeping in until almost noon, uploading a bunch of yesterday's photos to Facebook, and drinking coffee, reliving the magic of New Year's Eve. I had a lot of fun yesterday and was so blessed to spend it with my Dutch family members. It's actually the first time I ever spent New Year's eve with other people - usually the holiday isn't a big deal for me. But this year everything just felt so right!

Last night while watching the fire works, I decided not to make any resolutions, but "wishes" instead.

1. I hope to become a more caring and forgiving person this year. 
2. That I don't give in to the temptation of gossiping of others, even in casual conversation. 
3. That I stop remembering every bad thing that someone else did and continue to hold it against them. 
4. That I stop remembering "the pain" of my past mistakes, even though I'll never forget them. 
5. That I DO remember the pain of eating too many bon-bons in one sitting! Stop it!
6. That I care about my body. That I treat it better and remember to put on some makeup <3
7. As always, I continue to treat others as I want to be treated. 
8. Everyone deserves respect and second chances :)
9. And yes, even I need human contact every once and a while!

Wishes like these are closer to my heart and they are more important than reaching any "material" goals. I know that if I can grow as a person, I have more to share with others and in turn, I have better stories to tell. 

I believe that truly loving yourself is an emotion that will spill over into every other thing you do, for work or recreation, and people will be touched. That has always been my goal in life - to touch other people. Through creating games, stories, or just by being a friend. That is the legacy I want to leave behind. 

That being said, January and February are the "Now What?" months of NaNoWriMo!! I'm starting to get my energy back to tackle my novel once again - the holidays are great, but they are definitely distracting if you need to get real work done. I've worked on my novel plot and outline during the entire month of December. It's taken on a lot of new life, with more characters and extra conflicts. Just in it's pure skeleton form, I already have about  10,000 words!  I'm ready to begin my second draft of the book and this time, I know exactly where I'm going AND WHAT THE ENDING IS!!!

That's a huge relief  :P

Writing buddies, unite for a new round of writing and editing! Let's make all our wishes come true this year!