WIP Cracking Wednesday

Writing Accountability week 4/52

My mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read.

Greta Garbo, “Thinking of Cracking the Whip” from FanPop

Writing

I’ve got a submission deadline at the end of February for an anthology. I had a story started for that, and decided that I needed to not wait for the last minute to complete it. Crazy, right? So I dove into “Down Among the Dead Men”, a noir-ish story about a would-be detective in the afterlife. I added about 2800 words to what I already had and ended up at just over 10k. This may seem low, but that’s because along with the writing I was doing some…

Unfortunately, I didn’t do much else in the way of writing or submitting. C’est la vie. Part of keeping track is to understand what I’m capable of. Given how busy this week has been, I’m still happy with how things turned out.

Commitments for this week:

• Second editing pass for DAtDM, then get it out for critique

• Determine what existing stories I have that I should be submitting

• Check upcoming calls for submission for potentially interesting work

Editing

You may remember that last week, I finished doing the scene analysis for my novel “Sigils”. DAtDM was obviously much shorter, but I figured that would give me the opportunity to dig in and get some more practice along those lines. For my 10k story, I ended up spending two hours analyzing eight scenes while writing up around 2k worth of notes.

This wasn’t the same level of detail I gave my “Sigils” pass. There, I had 10x as many scenes, so I was not as focused. I wanted to see where the big problems were in my story so I could fix them and get the whole thing ordered correctly. For DAtDM, I flexed some structural editing muscles and dig into each scene specifically to see where it “fell down” on the job.

What I determined previously about my writing from the scene analysis in “Sigils” seemed to hold up, even for a short story. So what did I discover?

• It takes 10-15 minutes for me to analyze a scene. I’ll get better at that, I’m sure, but for now, I should plan on 4-6 scenes taking me an hour to dig into.

• Where I am now as a writer means that my first “rough” draft is probably about 75% complete. If I’ve got 10 scenes, I’ll probably need to do a significant rewrite on one and add another 1-2 scenes to help pull it all together.

• I do well in keeping to scene composition (one time, one place, one set of characters). If I have a weak scene, it’s often because I didn’t pay attention to my scene structure. I usually need to add progressive complications, or clearly show the turning point and the related decision being made.

In somewhat related news, I reached out to a structural editor to discuss a possible schedule for “Sigils”. With a little more knowledge under my belt, I think I’m ready to make a better-informed estimate about how long editing on that would take.

Based on what I’ve seen these last two weeks… given my schedule, I can get through about 8 scenes / 8k words in a week, if I commit to working every day. That’s analysis, reworking broken scenes, adding new scenes, and so on.

At the end of my last editing pass, sigils had 85 scenes & 70k words. That works out to 8-12 weeks of work. If I start now, I can expect to get through my second draft of “Sigils” in by end of March (if I’m feeling optimistic) or the end of April (if I’m being realistic). Both of those fit into my potential editor’s time schedule. So I think I will be making a commitment there. Whoof.

LibertyCon this year is at the end of June. I’ve never stated this, but for the past few months, I’ve thought that I wanted to show up there having made progress. To me, that means at least two more short stories published and a finished manuscript. I’m kind of geeked that it looks like I will be able to do both!

Commitments for this week:

• Start on the 2nd draft for “Sigils” (to be finished by end of April at the latest)

• Commit to an editing agreement (if still possible)

• Two short stories published before LibertyCon

• Review-ready draft of “Sigils” ready for LibertyCon

Reading

I finished Crow Moon by Cedar Sanderson. A++, highly recommended :) Next up, I think I will read Broken Roads: Returning to my Amish Father. This is the sequel to Ira Wagler’s NYT best-selling memoir, Growing Up Amish. Not my usual reading, but I really enjoy Ira’s writing style and his first book was beautifully written.

Other

On the kid side, Sungglepuppy is deep into her senior basketball season. We’ve got 6 games scheduled this week (no, really!) That’s fun - I do love to see her play - but it does eat up time. Thankfully, most of them are home games. Away games often kill an evening and leave me exhausted as I try to keep up.

I’m also involved in helping to plan a lady’s tea fundraiser for one of the non-profits I’m associated with. Not a whole lot for me to do, other than talk to people, but it is a fun project! I’m looking forward to helping pull this off.