I'm a hybrid!

I’ve decided to hybridize myself. Lots of writers are plotters-they plan out every detail of the path their story will take. And others write by “the seat of their pants” and are called pantsers. I decided to be a combination of both. So I henceforth am a plotster.

I found that I over did the plotting on some of the books I was working on so that I lost interest by the time I sat down to write the story. So then, I decided to be a pantser and not plot anything. I got part way into the story and completely lost the thread of what I was doing, partially because I didn’t know how to portray what was in my head, and my writing fizzled out. So, neither one worked for me.

I asked myself when I had enjoyed writing the most. And found that I do best when I have just a basic character sketch and one-liner clues/basic timeline w/ a few notes on plot conflict and motivation. May be that still makes me a plotter but I still claim the right to take off in a direction that my characters want to go and see where it takes me.

I’ve decided to pull out some of my old manuscripts, ones that I had grown tired of, and rework them a bit without choking the life out of them. I feel better now. The first one I’ll do after I finish this Novella MS because it goes w/ the theme and I hope to sell them as a group/anthology as a start to a series. See, the one I’m doing now was idea #3. #2 is done but #1 was …>Horrible!<… Hopefully I know how to make it work now.

Cablooey! My monitor...

Well, I was just getting into my writing groove last week when my computer monitor went on the blink. Although I knew the computer itself was fine, I could not reach any of my file’s or do anything for a week. I whined to my dad, and he is going to shop for a new monitor (he is the shopping king) and unbeknownst to me he had an old monitor I could use in the mean time. So I’m finally able to get back on the computer and get to my files, including my current manuscript – which I hadn’t backed up in a number of weeks. (That will teach me, right?)

This loaner monitor is ancient and huge with a tiny screen. It has now been deemed the Dinomonitor. But it works and I’m grateful. Thank you, Daddy. It did leave me time to really evaluate the manuscript I was working on and figure out what wasn’t working and what was. I hope to go into writing fresh this week and perform a fairly major overhaul. But I feel good about it and I’m no longer worried about my page quota.

I also plan to combine two other unfinished manuscripts into one story. The construction work continues, give me a hard hat.

adjusting your goals to fit your life!

After much soul searching, trying to figure out what was stumping me about the book I’ve been working on I came up with 2 problems:
1. I was working outside my comfort zone, trying to write a more complex and lengthy story than I’ve ever done before with any measure of success.
2. My goals were a bit unrealistic considering my current situation. I tend to make goals thinking I have completely normal situation, but the fact is I really have to take into consideration my physical challenges and the circumstances of my life.

With those things in mind, I decided not to fight my goals any more and instead set a realistic one that is achievable. I feel like I can breathe now and it feels much better. I was getting all stressed when I was coming up short every week. But the fact is I simply cannot meet the number of pages per day I had thought to be able to, and it was taking all of the excitement out of the creation process for me.

I’ve been writing every day and loving every minute of it and that is the most important thing, because that’s what makes me happy.

When the time comes, I may take this book off the shelf and rework it in a more comfortable format because the story really needs to be told and I think I was going about it all wrong in the effort to worry about Word Count. I’m learning as I go.