I got stuck yesterday. I finished a chapter with a couple of hundred words, then realized that even though I knew what was coming soon, I didn’t know what was next. So I spent some time organizing — going back and reminding myself of my loose threads and what needed to be tied together, working out which characters needed to be in which scenes, trying to decide the order of events and the timing for them. I wound up with about five open documents, three short sketches of scenes, an outline and character notes and a slightly different plan for the rest of the book. I have one piece of plot puzzle that I haven’t quite figured out and I really need to get that settled, but it stumped me yesterday so I moved on to scenes. I don’t know what my total word count was, but definitely less than 1000. Still, it was probably at least 500 and by my more recent standards, that marks it as a decent day.
And decent is better than nothing. Onward!
Yes, onward! Progress is progress. 😉
I’m still aiming for 30 days, but we’ll consider them 30 business days and not a calendar month. So, my first goal line is to prepare the foundation: character sketches, setting sketches, research list, episode summaries, and finally the series and episode plot sketches.
I’ll keep you posted.
Which makes me smile, even if it’s exasperating for you. On the few occasions when I’ve scanned G-man’s hard drive, it’s crammed with bits and pieces, just like you describe.
I usually wind up with hundreds of files by the time I finish the revisions on a book. Loads of docs where I liked something I wrote but it stopped fitting in, so I stuck it in another document to save the words and maybe use them later, but then never used them. It makes sorting through the files a bit of a nightmare at the end!