Mega Catch-Up Post

Since I've got so much to catch up on with my dailies, I will break them down here.

Thursday:

I logged my requisite word count on Thursday, which should have gone in a Friday post but I didn't have time before I had to leave work. I clocked 3,125 words, bringing my total up to 8,526 at that point.

I did the post-it note workshop (which I'll elaborate on if people want) with heavy modification, and ended up with my outline on the wall in a space of about six feet by four feet. It's neat. I can go stand in front of it and see everything at once. In the last two outlines I've done, I went in and mapped out each scene in each chapter. So, I had a long synopsis before I ever sat down to write the book. As previously documented, the first one wasn't very good and the second never got finished owing to plot problems.

So, after lamenting my unfinished outline for a few days but still getting writing done, I realized that maybe my wall outline was good enough. I have the major points in order, I've tied up all my plots on there so I don't have loose ends hanging out there, and I've handled character development and continuity with the way it's put together. So, if I'm adlibbing the scenes between those, maybe that's okay and it'll keep it more fresh as I'm writing. I decided to leave it that way for a bit and see how it goes. I can always fill in more details if I need to, but maybe I won't get as burnt out on it before I finish.

Friday:

The day of pool closing. Since it's unseasonably warm here (it was in the 80s on Friday) we were going to take advantage of that fact and close the pool without freezing our fingers and toes off. We got started, but my brother was already conscripted on another project and it's just not a job you can do with two people. So, I spent all afternoon working on that and then needed to take him to pick up his girlfriend. Whose birthday was Friday, and so then there was the dinner eating and talking. And I was POOPED. However, I'd kind of anticipated not getting my writing done on Friday and Saturday and working on it on Sunday in a big chunk.

Saturday:

The day of the family birthday. And more pool closing. The brother's girlfriend (BGF) had said that for her birthday she really wanted to do something all together with my family, which my family liked the idea of since we don't get to do stuff together very often. So, we planned a surprise sushi making class at my mom's since a friend of mine used to be a sushi chef and knows all the tricks. Saturday afternoon was supposed to be the day of going to the store and doing the pre-cooking things like cutting veggies and then the rolling would commence at dinner time.

Except the pool closing wasn't done. So, I got up at 7:30am to start working on the pool, and did that until it was time to go to the store at noon. Then with the cooking and cleaning from the cooking and eating the cooking, I didn't get home until after 11pm. No writing getting done.

Sunday:

Still no brother to help with pool. More pool closing work to do. So, we worked more on closing the pool and getting what we could done from about 10am until 4pm. This made for a very sore me, since that's three days in a row of bending over and fishing through water that's cold even though the weather on the top of the water was warm. Nobody to help cover pool, no pool covering happened.

But, I did sit down to start writing at 4ish. To find that my computer will only operate in safe mode. So, I ran through bunches of stuff like disk cleanup and defrag (after backing up my WIP) which meant that the writing part didn't actually start until 6:30pm. So much for the afternoon of writing. So, my 9,000 word goal didn't get reached. But, I did knock out 5,104 of them, bringing my total to 13,630. That caught me up on the minimum goal per day that will get me to the end of the NaNoWriMo event, but not for my longer goal.

I'm less confident with my loose outline plan now, though. I'm at a spot where if I continue to write chronologically, I'm not sure how I want to get from where I am to my next spot. I might just shift some things around instead, I haven't decided yet. Maybe it's just a good time to poke at the outline in the next section and see what it's going to do.

We'll see where we end up tonight.