Friday, September 17, 2021

Planning Ahead.

To my dearest friends and followers,
and to my fellow creatives,

Since August I have been working on my WIP (work in progress), aka, my novel, The Death of Jack, pretty consistently. I purchased The Essential Worldbuilding Blueprint and Workbook by Scribe Forge and I have since been consistently building the world for my story and Jack's world.

During November 2020, I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). For those of you who are unaware, NaNoWriMo is a non-profit organization that hosts the annual month long challenge (of the same name) for writers to work on their stories, and write a minimum of 50k words (the minimum word count for a novel). They offer writing advice and tips on storytelling, a word count tracker for keeping your novel on schedule, writing sprints (writing as much as possible in a timed session, in a group or by yourself), and a community of other participants and writers there to write along side you, encourage you, and help keep you accountable.

2020 was my second time doing NaNoWriMo (I first participated in 2016), and my first time hitting the 50k word count goal! I thought for sure I would finish The Death of Jack a few months after that. Looking back in my notebook, I see that I had a goal to have completed my rough draft by April of this year. That didn't happen, hehe. XD
I can also see that I kept updating my notebook, "finish book by May 15th," "finish book by June 30th," "finish book by September 22nd."
Needless to say, none of those dates were met, ha, oops. Life gets busy, you find other things to do, you get writers block - you understand, right? Right..?

In theory, I really wanted to finish my novel, but I felt like I wasn't able to, like my muses were silent, like I didn't know where my story was going, like I didn't understand the world it was set in. So I bought the Worldbuilding book. I thought I'd get through it pretty fast and still finish my novel by the autumnal equinox. Turns out, there's a lot more to world building than I realized (and I'm not mad about it). 

So now my plans have changed once again. I will finish the world building for my book by the end of September. I will spend October planning out the second half of my novel. In November, I will participate in NaNoWriMo once again and work toward finishing the second half of my second novel, The Death of Jack.

Yours truly,
Me

Additional:
Check out my first novel, The Story of Hollyhocks.
What is NaNoWriMo?