Category: How to Write a Novel
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Ohio 4… The outline is now in progress
Not much to say about that — it’s line-for-scene outlining, and the plotting out of the whole book before leaping in to write it is essential to not wrecking the damn thing going around a hard curve. I got a bit sidetracked — writing 722 words of the intro chapter (just to get my head…
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Ohio 3 is now done in first draft!
57,841 words total. I like the story. I love the ending. And now the novel gets to sit quietly for a while as I plot the replacement Ohio 4. In revision, it will probably get a bit longer. Most of my stuff does. Based on some very good advice, I am, however, now considering doing…
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Technically, I finished Ohio 3 this morning…
I’ll start my read-through, Monday. And I am considering the possibility of a final very short chapter to point the book toward Book 4. I have the empty file sitting in my template. But I’m not sure the “summation” chapter is needed, and I won’t know until I’ve finished the read-through. The book is currently…
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Evil Afoot — 2077 words, and I got a nice bit of a cliffhanger at the end
Very pleased with the nasty situation in which I’ve dumped my MC — she’s going to have a rough rest of the week, too. Evil is a foot (it left its footprint all over everydamnthing, in fact…) and my MC is in the process of using what she discovered to lead the bad guys into…
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Solid complications in Ohio Three today. 691 words, and 54,188 total
I love what I got. I didn’t get a huge wordcount, but I did get some spectacular complications to throw into the plot. The story’s coming together well. And now I’m at a tricky bit of plotting that is going to affect not just this book, but the next two, and probably have significant impact…
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A tricky bit to figure out for tomorrow… BUT done for today.
Tomorrow my MC has to figure out how to contact (and then rescue) someone important trapped behind enemy lines without breaking the rules that forbid her from having any contact with the enemy. I already know how she’s going to do this. I just need to figure out how to make it smooth, and clean,…
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Today was SOLID — and eventful: 2121 words, and 51,559 total
I’m over the hump and heading toward the ending now, and today’s scene and tomorrow’s scene are dark, and pretty scary for my MC and her folks, with a massive chance of things going so wrong that she could — with just one mistake — lose everything she has come to love (and not just…
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Happy Writing… and some love
My MC has discovered that she is not alone in the world, or the universe… and today I finally got to do some of the happy stuff with that. If I’d been able to keep all the words from today’s scene, the word count would have been a lot bigger. But I had to rip…
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It’s “Make Yourself Cry” Day…
I got good words. 997, to be exact. And I love what I got today. But some of what I wrote was pulled out of my real life, and part of it was me getting to do in fiction something I never had the opportunity to do in real life, because my real childhood was…
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Ohio 3, and the Shoe-Drop Moment
There’s the “make yourself cry” moment, and there was some of that today. I did, indeed, make myself cry. Again. There was a bit of making myself laugh. There was giving my character one moment I would take in a heartbeat if someone could just stop the world and roll back time. And there was…