Week One: Starting Again

My first full week of writing was surprisingly fruitful! Here’s last week’s stats:

Words written: over 11,000 words

Chapters completed: 4

Cups of coffee: 4 (drank tea instead one day)

Stress Level: 4 out of 10 (the main source of stress was the first day of writing—it was hard getting back into the swing of things)

Let me tell you, taking a full month to dream and prep for this book was a GAME CHANGER. I can’t stress to you enough how helpful it was to spend four weeks dreaming and scheming from 9 to 5. I don’t have everything planned or figured out, but I have a goal of where I need to get to for each chapter. Perhaps to some people, this revelation for me was a no-brainer, but I’m an artsy fartsy person and the amount of stress I had in setting anything in stone was truly terrifying. I also worried that wasting a whole month of not writing just to daydream was not going to make a difference, that I would veer away from my outline as soon as I began to develop my characters (I had a hard time developing my characters during the planning process so I gave up and resigned myself to at least coming up with backstories for them).

With the last book, I had trouble sticking to the chapter outlines that I had created day by day. I realize now how silly I was to think that creating an entire outline over a month would somehow lead to the same outcome. I’m also approaching this book from ground zero whereas, in the first one, I had slowly developed bits and pieces of it over a couple of years. I can easily toss out characters or change their characteristics for the sake of the plot without going through the pain of severing my attachment to them.

This book is a little different from the other as I am writing from the POVs of two separate characters who are currently living in two different worlds (socially) and are set on an inevitable course to meet each other. I have always loved stories like that, the suspense of wanting two characters you love to finally meet, and the anticipation of how they will react to discovering each other. I felt that suspense as I was writing the whole week. Thankfully the two meet relatively soon in the story (I hate dragged-out suspense). I actually finished that part today and I couldn’t help but beam the whole time. It’s humorous and probably crazy sounding, but I feel as though I’m reading the story as I write it— and I’m just as excited as the reader to figure out what happens.

It’s a short blog post today, and it will probably continue to be short, but hopefully more insightful on what I’ve accomplished every week! If I continue at the pace I am going I should be done writing Book Two by mid-October. That would be the same amount of time I took to write Book One— except this time I spent the whole first month not writing!

Visit arbledsoe.com for more info and to purchase her short story “Wipple and the Sîren”