National Novel Writing Month is right around the corner, and this year I will be working on the sequel to The Emperor's Daughter. I'm also going to try something completely different this year...posting what I write every day so that people have the experience to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.

I've noticed during my journey as an editor that a lot of people get so nervous about how "bad" they think their rough draft is that they get discouraged and either stop writing the first draft or never attempt to improve the first draft into something that is publishable (or just finished if publishing isn't their goal).

In the interest of radical transparency, I want to show other writers just how rough a rough draft can be, and hopefully by the end of the year I will be publishing it as a serial that has polished, respectable, readable parts based on what is sure to be a "bad" first draft (It's hard to write a good first draft of 50,000 words in 30 days). Since The Emperor's Daughter was a novel originally written just for enjoyment and offered for free, I believe that showing this process can only help other authors on their journey, although fans of The Emperor's Daughter might want to wait to read the finished product if you're not interested in a wild and unwieldy draft.

​I also plan to post the editing process on my editing website so that people can get an idea of what professional editing should be, with the caveat that editing your own novel is never as good as paying a professional editor to do that work for you, regardless of whether you are good enough at editing to offer professional services to others. 

I probably won't be starting at midnight this year, because that is way past my bedtime, but there's a good chance I'll be starting at 4 in the morning on Thursday, so feel free to join me! Remember, even if you don't "win" NaNoWriMo, everyone who tries is a winner in my mind.

 hSo that scene list continues to work for me, and I've kept up with my writing (almost) daily. I started out with seventeen scenes, which I'd mentioned not being overly enthused with because that would make for a very short novel, but I've already added six more as I wrote, so I think the length will grow organically. Still Snowflake-ish, but not perfect adherence to the method, which is what I'd predicted from the beginning.

I also found a new inspiration to keep me going. If planning my novel out with the Snowflake Method keeps me going by giving me something concrete to work with, stumbling upon the #OctWritingChallenge hashtag on Twitter gave me some external motivation.

National Novel Writing Month is next month, and next week's blog post will be on that, and hopefully by then I will have finally decided whether to have The Talented's sequel or The Emperor's Daughter's sequel for my NaNo project this year. However, my challenge for this month is only 500 words or 1 hour of editing a day.

This Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge has apparently been going on for years, originally geared toward people who couldn't meet NaNoWriMo's goal of 50,000 words in a month because life is just too busy but could commit to a smaller goal of 500 words a day, and so far it has really worked to inspire me to hit a very reachable goal. 500 words a day is just enough that you have to make a point of it, because you won't accidentally stumble into it, but isn't so much that you have to set the rest of your life on hold.

It's also a nice change from NaNo because it's 500 words every day. No making up for missed days. And you get to share it on Twitter, which makes for a fun community experience.

It's also getting me ready for NaNo by getting me writing daily again, a habit which is great to have and which I suffer to form again once I've broken it.

Unfortunately, blog posts don't count for #OctWritingChallenge, so I'm off to working on my novel again. There's a new 500 words/day writing challenge every month, so if you want to write in NaNo but can't manage 50k, check out #NovWritingChallenge on November 1st. 

I've blogged before about how I like to write my stories out long-hand first. I tried that in at least one of my first five attempts at writing the sequel to The Talented, so on the sixth time around I didn't bother breaking out the ol' pen and paper. And so far, the scenes I've written using the Snowflake Model on the computer seem to be good.

But this weekend, I headed up north for a vacation with my family, and as part of this I left my computer behind. But, as you fellow writers and other creative people might predict, the creative bug hit me while I was up there, computerless.

So I went old school. I grabbed a pen and some paper, and I sat and wrote. I had left off after finishing scene two, so even though I didn't have my previous work in front of me, I'd done enough planning to know what came next, and I was able to pick it up there. I wrote scene three while sitting on the couch in front of the fire, surrounded by family and friends, and it was nice.

Relaxing.

Healing.

I was able to enjoy the process, and knowing that I enjoy it has helped make me excited about it again. I'll be typing up those pages that I wrote later today, and I have a good feeling about them. I feel like they will be worth typing up, and that this time around, the book I'm working on will be worth writing.

So anyone out there feeling despair about their work, don't give up. Try a different planning method, as I've detailed the past two weeks, and if that doesn't work, try a different execution method.

Go old school if you write your first drafts on a computer. Go "new school" and type as you write if you're typically a write-first, type later writer. Record yourself on your phone while driving and type it all up or write it all down when you get home if you come up with brilliant ideas while running errands.

Try something different. Different planning; different execution; different outlook.

And find the fun. That's why we do it.

Last week, I discussed how due to serious difficulties writing anything resembling a decent sequel to The Talented, I turned to Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method for help, and planned to fight past my inner laziness to actually complete all the steps.

Well, today I am reporting that I've mostly done that. I did skip the character sketch step for the moment, since it's a sequel and I'm familiar with the characters, although I plan to come back to that if I ever sit down to write and don't know what to put down, because then at least I'm working on the same novel, instead of getting sidetracked again and again.

That said, while I obviously haven't finished writing the sequel yet, I do have a good start on it because I have my scene list down. I've never really made a scene list before. The closest I've come to that would be when writing a NaNo novel like The Emperor's Daughter, where I'd plug in scenes as they came to me in Scrivener until I got something coherent. But that's NaNo, something I do for fun. I take my Talented series more seriously, which is why I'm willing to keep rewriting that sequel again and again until I get it right.

​But back to that scene list...what did I learn?

Firstly, that I preferred writing the long synopsis to the scene list. Secondly, that my scenes don't naturally have enough conflict, and thirdly, that if I try to plot this way, my "novel" will probably have about 20,000 words. As of now, my scene list only consists of seventeen scenes. I know I will end up adding more, but what more I can't see yet, because even though I can see the story better now, I can't decide which added scenes would enhance the story, and which would be fluff. So I'll start with those seventeen and keep the list fluid.

However, despite my dissatisfaction with a scene list of only seventeen scenes, I'm otherwise pleased with the exercise, because that plus the synopsis has allowed me to see this novel for the first time, and I think that means I have a chance of actually completing a draft worth keeping.

So if you're as stuck as I was, try a different plotting method to get the juices flowing. It can't hurt!