On outlines and plantsing

I tell you what: Comedy of Rain has been a bear to wrestle with, and I'm not talking about Hipólito.

Before Tragedy of Ice was anything more than one book, I'd had only stray ideas about what the characters' lives were going to be like after the fact. Nothing truly solid to make another story with, but thoughts of "Oh, that's how ___ is going to happen" or "Oh, now that'll be interesting if they ____ when ____". And then my favourite muse finished reading Tragedy of Ice and said, "You know what? Their story's not done. You need another book."

And another book became three more books. The Europan Theatre is what I've coined as the series name (finally!), and it's slated to be a tetralogy. Now that could change as I go along, but I can't speak to that until I reach that point in the road.

But the muse spoke, and I listened, so back in . . . we'll say October, I scripted an outline for Comedy of Rain so I could have my ducks in a row for NaNoWriMo 2015. Following the same format as Tragedy of Ice, I scripted one prologue, 34 chapters, and an epilogue, with the only difference this time being that Hipólito had POV chapters. And that was fine. Mostly. Sorta. Kinda.

Not really.

The prologue went according to plan, but being NaNoWriMo, I recapped Tragedy of Ice so much that it inflated to probably 5,000 words past its necessary word count. Then chapter 1 introduced a character who wasn't supposed to show up until chapter 5, and that was okay. I could work with that. Chapter 2 had that character show up again, and I'm thinking, "Oh, crap, he's gonna have a bigger role, isn't he?"

Naturally, this was the point where all planners start to reconsider their outline, but being NaNoWriMo, I had to soldier on. So by chapter 5, a whole new subplot arose, and that was that. I had to wing it all the way through NaNo, using my outline as a general target while adapting to where the plot rivers took me. And, boy oh boy, were there some interesting rapids that got thrown in my way.

Flash forward to the end of NaNo, and I thought I only had less than ten chapters left to write. I was wrong. I brought Comedy of Rain back out to work on for April's Camp NaNoWriMo, and all those rapids that'd come up before only got more treacherous as I went. Suffice to say, I busted my outline and—while I did get the occasional bit from my originally scripted chapters—I ended up having to fly by the seat of my pants.

Which was not a fun experience.

Kadiza, Franklin, and Hipólito were facing new obstacles, and I was drawing blanks on how to get them to solve them. I did the best I could, and while I reached my goal for Camp NaNo, I was left with a still yet unfinished manuscript. Now I'm all the way through May, and I've been taking my time, slogging on through the difficult parts, and avoiding writer's block (gasp!) by reminding myself that all the things I don't like about Comedy of Rain right now can all be fixed during the revisions. I won't allow myself to go back and begin revisions yet, especially since I still haven't finished the story.

What I am doing is allowing myself to make notes and revisit my outline. Sort of like creating "stage direction", I've got my new outline that's accounting for all the changes made to date, plus what's left to write tentatively annotated on the outline. The ending hasn't really changed, but the next several chapters could end up going directions I never expected. And if that happens, yes, I'll have to redo my outline, but at least at that point I'll know the fate of certain characters, as well as what I need to do when I go back to actually revise and start weaving in the new threads properly. Or "tightening the shoelaces", as I like to call it. Everything's essentially there now, so it just needs better allusions and foreshadowing so that the setup rings true with the reveals. And, as always, the iceberg knowledge of what's been going on in the background so that I can pull from that info and write the best story I can.

As NaNoWriMo 2015 draws to a close

NaNoWriMo 2015 is officially over for me. I validated last night with a whopping 61,514 words. The story is only halfway done. I'm on chapter 17 of 34 (plus a prologue and an epilogue), so I still have quite a ways to go.

On the plus side, I got the intimidating part out of the way: starting the novel. That's always where I'm the most leery. I sit and stare and wonder how on page 1, a blank page of nothing, I can ever start a work of any length. But then once I do, I go at it like a dog with a bone. I worry at the words, pouring what's in my head out onto paper, and just do my best to get it all out.

Installing drivers takes the longest time imaginable . . ..

Now that I've gotten NaNo out of the way, I can ease off the throttle some, take the rest of Comedy of Rain in swings as I work to finish final edits and revisions on "Comeuppance", and get its coverart ready to go.

Speaking of coverart: I lost my reference photos. I have no idea what I did with them. So I had to surf around this past week, finding new ones and forming a collection. On the upside, I found some better reference photos than the ones I originally had, and I'm hoping to pull off the smoke in art nouveau style. *fingers crossed*

But at least I'm getting things sorted with my new laptop. I had to update everything to do with my Intuos4 tablet to get everything to work right, and now that I've gotten it settled, the only thing left to do will be to transfer my colour pallets from my old computer to my new one. Not looking forward to that, since the last time I did such a transfer, I ended up having to go in and rename each colour individually. *sigh*

Anyway, my goal now is to get the coverart for "Comeuppance" completed by January 1st, and that's doable, or at least I think so. I still haven't set an official date for the release in February, but I'll get there eventually. Perhaps I'll have all my revisions done by January 1st, too, and I can announce everything all at once. We'll see.

Until then, I hope you all are enjoying the holiday season. I haven't exactly gotten into the full swing of things (I blame NaNo for that lol), but at least I had a four-day weekend to enjoy. Tomorrow is my return to the "real world", but at least I feel like I accomplished some things this weekend.

Cheers!

Hi. I'm Ash, and I'm a NaNo-holic

I made it . . . 4 days into November before I relapsed and fell off the wagon.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo, writing the sequel to Tragedy of Ice. My original outline for Comedy of Rain wasn't very actiony. It had me worried. It's definitely different in regards to the pacing that Tragedy of Ice has. But I've had some things surprise me. A fight scene I didn't originally plan. A subplot with the other colonists that I didn't expect (I'm looking at you now, Suresh).

Kadiza's in a mostly good place this time (until people start screwing things up for her). Franklin is questioning everything (because he has no idea where he stands anymore). Hipólito has secrets—and a POV—for once (and he's going to snap if people keep after him the way they are).

As of last night, I have 33,749 words written. I'm only on chapter 7 of a planned 36 (prologue and epilogue included in that count). I'm sure most everything in the first few chapters is unnecessary NaNo wordiness (who am I kidding, it's all wordiness – I read a sentence I wrote last night that's 26 words, and it should only be 5), so once Comedy of Rain is confirmed as a NaNo winner, I'm going to go back and cut the superfluous writing to get a better balance.

The real follow-up problem I'm going to have with Comedy of Rain is figuring out how much recap of Tragedy of Ice needs to actually be there. There are obviously strong references to events that took place in the first book, so those will have to stay to make sense, but then there's so much of it I included as infodump (because it was easy) that will have to go because it's inflated the opening chapters unnecessarily.

Oh, well, back to the grind. The sooner I get the 50,0000 words, the sooner I can get back to the other many things on my to-do list.