Addicted to Reading

I've been thinking lately about a couple of things, and I've discovered that reading, when you do it often enough, and you get into a certain book, it's almost a compulsive obsession. It's kind of a strange compulsion to have at first, but, when you get used to it, it's actually pretty fun to play around with. I'm on a goal to write a million words by October (since I started my year in November of last year), and, also, to read 100 books this year. I've actually only started on my first book (The Hobbit), but I've also figured out a few more that I'm hoping to read. For example, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (since The Hobbit is the prologue to that), the whole Narnia series, and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I've been wanting to read the latter for a while, and it was sort of MIA when it was actually Christmas season. It is a hilarious book, and I would highly recommend it.

So, getting back to the actual update of my actual writing process, I've been doing fairly good, I think - I wrote part of another chapter on Double Trouble, and, even though it's going pretty slowly, I'm thinking that it is going to be a fun book to write once it's fully outlined. I think that also may be part of my problem. Not all of my book is outlined - actually not much of it at all was; probably only a chapter; when I actually started to write it, just because I was so eager to. I know that I probably shouldn't have, and it probably wasn't the smartest idea in the world, but I'm still going to go with it - you know what I mean? Sometimes, you just know that something's a good idea, even when it might not seem like it at the time. Take this example for instance; if I hadn't started writing it, I wouldn't be able to get my 3k words a day for my Milwordy. And, even though it is going very slowly, it gives me words.

I think that the main idea of Milwordy is actually a really neat one and actually pretty encouraging. You see, there is this famous writing quote that says that that 'the first million words are practice." Might as well get them over with as soon as possible. :P. I don't know why, but that's the way that my mind just happens to work. I start to relate things to others, and then I want to look at things about that subject. That's why I love the whole idea of Wikidpad. I don't think that I've talked about that yet, but, quite frankly, I highly recommend it. It's a free program that you download and put on your desktop - it's almost like Wikipedia, only simplified greatly. Basically you just make your own wiki. I've been putting all of my writing information (book names, characters, locations, systems of magic, etc.) in it. So yeah. Well, anyways, until next time, go write something!!

Double Trouble

Like I mentioned on the last post, I had started the outlining/planning stage of a new novel, trying to up my word count for Milwordy (the challenge to get a million words written in a year. Last night I was doing the math and I realized that I only have to do 3k words a day to be able to get my Milwordy. That's not bad, since I can get those words done in a little less than an hour and a half using Write or Die. I actually started trying to figure out what my style of planning/outlining was by going online and simply looking up a ton of ideas. I tried snowflake outlining, but that sort of got old pretty quick.

I also tried a basic, everyday phase outline. That worked (I was using it on my Blue Flames novel) until I got tired of writing out all of those separate stages and sort went on a fly by the seat of my pants type of thing instead. I liked that, but I don't think that I could do it for the whole novel. I'm also thinking that I could do a snowflake outline if I wanted to, and I decided that it's probably the current novel that I'm working on that's totally not working for that type of outline. And also my personality. The snowflake method has you expand your plot slowly but still steadily - my personality makes me want to describe everything in great detail the first time around. Unless I do a really, really, REALLY simplified version.

Taking those notes into consideration, I think I finally found what works for me. Or at least for my current novel. What I did for this novel (Double Trouble I think it's going to be called) is made a list of 10 plot points - you know, major parts of the story that can actually be greatly expanded. That's what I did - found 10 parts of the story I thought would be interesting enough to be able to expand to at least 5k. (I did the math and figured out that each plot point would have to be around 5k words when finished to make a 50k novel, which is the minimum accepted length.)

That wasn't it, though. I then went into a separate document and expanded each plot point, though only slightly. It wasn't too hard, and I have a full page summary of my novel. That gives me a bit more detail to put into my scenes when I'm doing my work in Ywriter, which I'm also having a lot of fun exploring. Ywriter is a free program that actually allows you to write notes, keep characters, locations, items, chapters and scenes all in order, as well as outlining, doing the actual writing, and editing, all in the same program! Check it out. So, until next time, have fun and go write something!!