Amanda Frederickson's Blog: Musings - Posts Tagged "deadlines"
Deadlines and Doom
"I like deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams
I don't particularly like the sounds of deadlines whooshing by, but I seem to be hearing them a lot lately.
There's a persistent little cheerleader in the back of my head insisting that Kingstone can still be finished by the 21st. Finished? Maybe. Presentable? Not likely. Just the other day I found a place where Charlie was filing miserably when she should have been failing. Yeah. I haven't given the manuscript to my readers yet.
Whoosh.
Apparently I was being even more idealistic than I thought when I set June 21st as the tentative release date. I also didn't realize at the time that Kingstone would end up needing the most wholesale changes of any manuscript I've ever written (seven full length ones so far). I don't think there's more than a handful of paragraphs left of the original draft, and only chunks out of the second one.
Funny enough, working on Kingstone this week has been going smashingly. I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up and what's been coming out on the page. It's just not going to be done by this Friday.
So. Question of the week. Have I written the Ending of Doom?
Erm. Hm. Not yet. By the end of the week? Possibly. I'm dancing around it.
A while back on Facebook I saw a link to a list titled Top Ten "Puppy-Kick" Moments in Doctor Who. Not literally puppy-kicking, but meaning those gut-wrenching twists that make you feel like curling up and bawling for a while.
I'm planning at least two of those.
They're in my head. I have the scenes laid out. I haven't put the words on the page. I don't like kicking puppies, even if it's for a reason. (Nee-chan would argue and say I do it too often.)
Death happens. So does loss and separation. It doesn't mean we have to like it. The good news here is that this book isn't the end. There's another one coming, but you have to get through the middle to reach the end.
(Random trivia: Douglas Adams wrote a few scripts for the classic Doctor Who series. I wonder what they thought of his philosophy regarding deadlines.)
I don't particularly like the sounds of deadlines whooshing by, but I seem to be hearing them a lot lately.
There's a persistent little cheerleader in the back of my head insisting that Kingstone can still be finished by the 21st. Finished? Maybe. Presentable? Not likely. Just the other day I found a place where Charlie was filing miserably when she should have been failing. Yeah. I haven't given the manuscript to my readers yet.
Whoosh.
Apparently I was being even more idealistic than I thought when I set June 21st as the tentative release date. I also didn't realize at the time that Kingstone would end up needing the most wholesale changes of any manuscript I've ever written (seven full length ones so far). I don't think there's more than a handful of paragraphs left of the original draft, and only chunks out of the second one.
Funny enough, working on Kingstone this week has been going smashingly. I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up and what's been coming out on the page. It's just not going to be done by this Friday.
So. Question of the week. Have I written the Ending of Doom?
Erm. Hm. Not yet. By the end of the week? Possibly. I'm dancing around it.
A while back on Facebook I saw a link to a list titled Top Ten "Puppy-Kick" Moments in Doctor Who. Not literally puppy-kicking, but meaning those gut-wrenching twists that make you feel like curling up and bawling for a while.
I'm planning at least two of those.
They're in my head. I have the scenes laid out. I haven't put the words on the page. I don't like kicking puppies, even if it's for a reason. (Nee-chan would argue and say I do it too often.)
Death happens. So does loss and separation. It doesn't mean we have to like it. The good news here is that this book isn't the end. There's another one coming, but you have to get through the middle to reach the end.
(Random trivia: Douglas Adams wrote a few scripts for the classic Doctor Who series. I wonder what they thought of his philosophy regarding deadlines.)
No More Goals
Last night Nee-chan gave me a much-needed verbal slap upside the head. My method of goal setting just isn’t working. (For examples, start with the beginning of my blog and keep reading.)
When it comes to writing methods, I’m of the “try everything until you find what works and then use it” school of thinking, but I haven’t been applying this to my goal setting. I basically just have a bad habit of doing things like deciding to finish (first draft, revision, and polish) three novels in one year, without actually looking at my average word count per day and deciding if it was attainable. I just decided it was attainable, because you can do anything if you set your mind to it, right?
My right brain is very good at setting lofty goals. My left brain is very good at shutting down under pressure when the deadlines for those goals loom up.
So, instead of just thinking it ain’t broke, it’s time to fix it.
No more deadline goals.*
*Except Nanowrimo, which is an entity of itself, and I’m no longer going to let myself get hung up on the idea of having a nice, neatly packaged first draft at the end of the month.
When it comes to writing methods, I’m of the “try everything until you find what works and then use it” school of thinking, but I haven’t been applying this to my goal setting. I basically just have a bad habit of doing things like deciding to finish (first draft, revision, and polish) three novels in one year, without actually looking at my average word count per day and deciding if it was attainable. I just decided it was attainable, because you can do anything if you set your mind to it, right?
My right brain is very good at setting lofty goals. My left brain is very good at shutting down under pressure when the deadlines for those goals loom up.
So, instead of just thinking it ain’t broke, it’s time to fix it.
No more deadline goals.*
*Except Nanowrimo, which is an entity of itself, and I’m no longer going to let myself get hung up on the idea of having a nice, neatly packaged first draft at the end of the month.
Being Rebellious
I won Nanowrimo this year, and I did it by being absolutely rebellious.
I decided about three months ago to plan my Nano novel in advance this year and to also try a new genre for my 10th Nanowrimo anniversary. (Yikes!)
So I did. I had outlines, character sheets, I tried out the snowflake method, I had scene sketches, the works. Then, on Halloween, after a crazy busy and stressful week(s), having freshly lost a Halloween flash fiction contest, I ditched all of my planning. I just couldn’t do it.
I rebelled.
I started scribbling on a stray story seed that had been floating in my head for a while, but I also knew it wasn’t quite ready to be a full novel; it still needed a villain, for one thing. Keeping in mind my recent resolution not to stress out over deadlines, I decided to count everything I wrote during the month toward the word count goal.
The result?
A 52,000 word end count (partly estimate based on handwritten pages, so it might technically be a little higher than that). Masquerade’s secondary plotline is slowly filling in, Kingstone is finally almost to a place where I feel like I can start prying my perfectionistic claws out of it, that fairy tale novella I started back in August might actually be a novel, I have three new short pieces (complete), and I’ve freshened up an older one that I’m now thinking about folding into an anthology. Oh, yeah, and at the end of the month, that story seed got its villain. It’s going to be epic.
For the first test of my resolution not to set impossible goals: so far, so good.
I decided about three months ago to plan my Nano novel in advance this year and to also try a new genre for my 10th Nanowrimo anniversary. (Yikes!)
So I did. I had outlines, character sheets, I tried out the snowflake method, I had scene sketches, the works. Then, on Halloween, after a crazy busy and stressful week(s), having freshly lost a Halloween flash fiction contest, I ditched all of my planning. I just couldn’t do it.
I rebelled.
I started scribbling on a stray story seed that had been floating in my head for a while, but I also knew it wasn’t quite ready to be a full novel; it still needed a villain, for one thing. Keeping in mind my recent resolution not to stress out over deadlines, I decided to count everything I wrote during the month toward the word count goal.
The result?
A 52,000 word end count (partly estimate based on handwritten pages, so it might technically be a little higher than that). Masquerade’s secondary plotline is slowly filling in, Kingstone is finally almost to a place where I feel like I can start prying my perfectionistic claws out of it, that fairy tale novella I started back in August might actually be a novel, I have three new short pieces (complete), and I’ve freshened up an older one that I’m now thinking about folding into an anthology. Oh, yeah, and at the end of the month, that story seed got its villain. It’s going to be epic.
For the first test of my resolution not to set impossible goals: so far, so good.
