Writing status update (#33)
It’s been a little over a month since my last update. The first couple of weeks weren’t very productive at all for the sort of writing I mean when I just say “writing,” as I sort of expected, but the last three have been increasingly but inconsistently productive. I could describe what I did in detail and chronological order, but it’s probably better to primarily compare my progress to the goals I set for myself last month.
As you may recall, I tend to divide my Shine Cycle development time between “plotting” (outlining, assigning point-of-view to characters, and eventually the actual writing), “worldbuilding” (using questions created by Patricia Wrede I found years ago, a “Deep Cultural Fractalling System” and “Race Fractalling System” I found on Holy Worlds, and—mistakenly, but the classification has stuck and keeps progress moving faster—creating loglines and doing “snowflake outlining”), and “characters” (creating character histories, biographies, and descriptions.
Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
I’ll actually count this as a partial success. The two weeks of minimal progress were the week in which my class ended (requiring far more “crunch” than I like but actually somewhat less than I was beginning to fear) and I drove up to Evart for the dulcimer festival, then the next week was a week of recovery from all that exertion.
For the same reason, combined with the way I set up tasks in my task tracker months if not years ago so that things I didn’t expect when planning a month come up for me to do, I’m counting most of my results below as “partial credit.”
Create concepts and super-sequence outlines for, and assign POV for, six of the “Alternate Universes” sub-series.
I have concepts for four of them, and created a super-sequence outline for one.
Answer at least five of the “Wrede questions” that I postponed when I went through the list a few years ago.
Three.
Write loglines for at least three of the planned stories that don’t have them yet.
Two.
Do “snowflake step 2” for four planned novels.
One—and it was one of the most difficult, since it’s the one where I have only the “premise” and some notes from more than a decade ago, without even a super-sequence outline yet. “Snowflake fractalling” first may be better than outlining first, but it feels more difficult and frustrating because I’m not used to it.
Write at least five character histories and at least five character biographies.
Two and two. That few biographies largely because I put off the histories for so long.
Finish the Alliance précis I’ve been postponing for a couple of years now
Since it hasn’t appeared on this blog, I obviously haven’t finished it.
Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post before the next status update.
I’m going to count my list of alternate history ideas I’m not planning to use.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”
That, no. Though I did write a nearly-two-thousand-word letter from Evart, and about twenty-five hundred words in my final classwork for my summer-term class.
Like I said, I’m counting most of that as “partial credit,” about what I should have expected given that I knew I would have some “crunch” to finish classwork, that I hoped to go to Evart, and that both any classwork “crunch” and Evart would require some recovery time. So I’m at least somewhat satisfied.
I start my next set of classes next week, so I can’t be too ambitious in non-class-related writing goals. (I expect classwork won’t be so time-consuming at first as to restrict progress here, but I don’t know when it’ll get that way, so I’ve set my expectations low.) So here are the goals I think I can reasonably meet in the next month or so:
Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
Create super-sequence outlines for three of the “Alternate Universes” sub-series.
Answer at least two of the “Wrede questions” that I postponed when I went through the list a few years ago.
Write loglines for at least two of the planned stories that don’t have them yet.
Do “snowflake step 2” for at least one planned novel.
Write at least two character histories and at least one character biography.
Finish the Alliance précis I’ve been postponing for a couple of years now
Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post before the next status update.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”
As always, we’ll see how reality matches up to those goals.
Filed under: Status updates
