My writing slowed down significantly during the Writing and Illustratin for Young Readers conference a week ago, and it hasn’t really picked up at all since then. For my seven day totals, I’ve only been averaging between 17k and 14k–that means, on average, I’m doing about half what I want to be doing. Blah.
While I haven’t been writing a whole lot, however, I have been doing a lot of outlining. It looks like I’m going to be throwing out a ton of scenes, putting other scenes in different chapters, and adding whole new scenes in places where I previously didn’t have any. Yikes.
In other words, I’m in the process of completely reconceptualizing the structure of this novel–taking a few steps back and looking at the entire project as a whole. It’s taking up a heck of a lot of time right now, but hopefully it will help the rewriting process to be more successful. After all, if I try to stumble through without a clear idea of what I want this story to be, it’s just going to be a waste of time.
But if I’m going to finish this draft before August 1st, I need to pick up the pace. If this draft runs up to 150k as expected (and at the current rate, it could easily go over), I need to do just under 22k per week. That means, if I do anything less than 3k per day over the next six weeks, I’m going to fall behind this deadline.
The deadline is entirely arbitrary and artificial, but still, I want to keep it. Keeping deadlines is a writing skill I want to train myself to do, and I think it will help me out tremendously down the road.
So the goal this week is to pick up the pace again and get the seven day totals back up to 24k by next Sunday. It’s going to be something of a psychological struggle to get the momentum up again, but it’s something I know I can do. Inshallah.
In the meantime, I’ve been putting together some awesome ideas for a steampunk novel. Things are starting to gel for my next big project, and I’m getting REALLY excited. I still have an enormous amount of research to do before I can begin (like, tons of research), so I won’t get started just yet, but man! The ideas in my head are hot, I can feel it!
I know I’m speaking in vagaries…but to make up for it, I’ll leave you with a link to this wicked awesome steampunk picture I found the other day. Seriously–how cool would it be to be this guy??
That picture is sweet.
I’m glad to see that you’re working on a steampunk story in the background. Though I haven’t kept up so well on my story (although I’ve sat down to write a few times), I’ve done a little research on steampunk, and it seems like there’s really just not a lot of good steampunk out there. I think stuff like “The Difference Engine” and “Mainspring” are pretty popular, but they’re almost literary. What the publishing world needs is some good, exciting steampunk. I don’t think there’s really any YA steampunk, or much fantasy/steampunk (like mine), etc. Might be a good way to break in.