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!