Monday Morning: Preparing for the Next Phase
So I reached a rather big milestone at the end of last week: writing all the way through Act I (of four). This is roughly a quarter of the overall story. In this iteration, it clocked in at about 110 pages and 60,000 words.
I certainly plan to continue on in the same fashion, hoping to complete each of the remaining Acts in the same manner. If this takes 4-8 weeks per Act, I’d be totally done with this draft in 12-24 weeks (4-6 months). Seems like a long time… but ultimately, quantitiy is not what is important. I want to finish the job as it properly deserves to be done.., I’m not looking to feel good about myself for how much I’ve written or how long I spent writing it.
So now, being the Monday morning I’ve finished a big part of the journey, how do I continue? My plan at the moment is not to dive off immediately into Act II in the fashion of the previous 7-8 weeks, at least not immediately so. I want to take inventory of what I’ve done, where I’ve been, how I might improve, and finally lay the groundwork for where I’ll be going.
The last of these points is perhaps the most important: I know that some pre-writing for Act II will be of huge benefit when the time for actual straight-up drafting comes. I know, for example, that I’ll need to have names of several dozen new characters and several villages. These are things I want to spend a day thinking about very soon, before properly setting off on the journey of drafting Act II.
Another point, as mentioned in previous posts, is the need to set up a repository for ideas & notes that I’m having while doing this round of drafting. It is very important that this repository NOT be the place I’ve been keeping notes for the last few years, as that is a large and messy attic filled with too much stuff. Much of this stuff is useful (and will be called upon), but I want to start off new. This is necessary when I have years of ideas to draw from. The most likely repository vehicle will be a wiki, which I hope to set up very soon.
Goal this weeK: get appropriately set for this upcoming journey. I want to make sure this isn’t an excuse to be lazy (and not straight-up write)… so I will probably expect stringent progress reports of myself. I want to account for my time. I want not to give myself even the chance to get soft with this.
