Book in a Month Redux: Days 5 through 8

So you might have noticed that I'm not posting as many blogs as I did the first time around. And you might be wondering why. I will explain.

Like most people, I'm crazy busy. Not that I have kids or anything so super life-consuming like that (though that would be nice). No. My business comes from everything else going on in my normal life. See I have a day job that I must work full time so that my hubby and I can actually make money and, you know, subsist. I also am incredibly active in my church, which means I have youth group on Wednesday (which I love), church on Sunday (which I also love), small group on Thursday (yup, love that too) and other random church events scattered throughout the month. Then there's the whole family/friends thing, which means making time to actually see them. Oh and I have to sleep and eat and write and exercise and, because of my joint issues, spend a lot of time resting my joints between all these activities because if I don't I can't do any of them. All that is to say, that as much as I love posting on my blog (now that I actually do, and kind of have something to write about), it is often the casualty of my hectic life. I will, of course, still post, but, at least for the foreseeable future,  it will only be every couple of days. :)

So, now that my guilt-fueled over-sharing has been taken care of, I bet you want to know how the writing's going, especially after the trouble I was having last week. The answer: it's going really well. I realized at some point last week that I was trying too hard to write something totally different from my original draft and it was making me lose my connection with the story. The original (unfinished) draft of the story was, for the most part, pretty decent, if rough. But I thought that I needed to write the same situations in a completely different way. Thus, the writers block.

Once I realized that I could incorporate the original ideas and dialogue and whatnot, tweaked to match-up with the new POV and changed to make a little more sense, the writing started flowing again. And that makes me super happy.

Sometimes I get so caught up in changing what I think are problems with my stories that I forget that sometimes I had some pretty decent ideas to begin with. And when I let myself get back to those ideas, under controlled circumstances, the story comes so much easier. :)

So here are the numbers for the past few days.

Pages Written for Days 5 through 8:  24

Total Pages thus Far: 48

Words: 6,179

Total Words thus Far: 12,579

Book in a Month Redux: Days 3 and 4

Life is busy so I couldn't post yesterday. Wednesdays are just generally crazy for me. I didn't even get all my pages written yesterday because of work and youth group. But I'm all caught up again now.

So I've discovered (or really rediscovered) something in this first writing week. Writing a whole new story is hard. Really hard. I keep finding myself feeling like this story isn't coming together at all. When I was writing the original version of it, it was pretty easy. But now, it feels all stilted and weird. It's not flowing like my last WIP did. I can't seem to get into the mode of wanting to write it like I was before.

I still like the story idea, but the actual story writing is really hard this time around for some reason. And I can't really figure out why.

But I'm pushing through it, writing even though it feels off somehow. I'll keep going and hopefully it will get smoother the further into the story that I get.

Do y'all ever have that happen with your writing? Where you start a story and think it's great, but then suddenly everything feels stiff and hard to write, like you're not connecting to it anymore? If so, what do you do?

So here are the numbers for the pas two days.

Pages: 12 

Total Pages thus Far: 24

Words: 3,364

Total Words thus Far: 6.612

Book in a Month Redux: Day 2

It's finally starting to feel like fall here. Whether it stays feeling that way is anybody's guess, but today it was pleasantly chilly. Days like today make me wish I could simply take a good book and go sit in the sun all day, enjoying the lovely weather before things get cold and nasty again.

But enough of my musings on weather. How goes the writing, you ask. It goes well. Of course, it's only the second day, so it better be going well. :)

Today I introduced my male lead character. His name is Keller Brydon, and can I just say that he's amazing. At least I think so. I think you will too, but hey, that's just me.

So I guess i could actually tell you a little about this story, couldn't I? Okay, I will.

My new story takes place in world rather different from my last WIP. In this world, magic is pretty commonplace. About half the county's population has some kind of magic, including my two main characters. The magic in this world differs from my previous story as well, because it's not elemental magic. This magic is all mental. Those with magic have visions, can see when some one is lying, can find someone using their mind, can sense things about people, and more. Every bit of the magic is mental. So no manipulating the natural forces, unless you have telekinesis or something like that.

So what kind of magic do Raelin and Keller have? Well, Raelin is a Seer. Keller, he's a Truth-Sayer, or Truth-Seer.

And that's all you get for now. I'll be posting a brief discription of the story on my Projects page sometime later this week. I just have to actually write it first. :)

Now for the numbers.

Pages: 6 

Total Pages thus Far:12

Words: 1,517

Total Words thus Far: 3,263

Book in a Month Redux: Day 1

Yup, I'm doing it again. And I'm blogging about it, again.

So, doing the book in a month for my other WIP worked so well, and left me feeling so great about getting it accomplished that I have decided to write another BIAM.

This time, I'm using BIAM to write another story that I've been stuck on for a couple of years. I got the idea a few years ago from, of all things, a dream I had. Since then, I've been fiddling with it here and there, but I've never actually written out the whole story.

That's what I'm going to do with BIAM this time. In the next four weeks, I will finally get the story down on paper and give it an ending.

This actually makes me kind of nervous. See, I've never written a story like this one. It has a bit of a crime solving element to it, and I'm not sure how that's going to work out. But I really want to try it, so that's what I'm going to do. The other worry I have is that I've only had this idea for a couple of years, not the decade that I had with my other story, so I haven't worked out the characters and plot quite as much as I did for my other story. That makes me nervous. But I think that's where the BIAM is going to help me out a bit. All the work sheets will help me figure out this idea better. And that's what I'm excited about.

So for day one, I'm supposed to write out a one sentence summary and complete a worksheet about my plot, characters, and setting for Act I. I haven't actually done this yet because I had to order another copy of the BIAM book and haven't gotten it yet. But don't worry, when the book gets here, I'll do all the worksheets.

So I bet you might be wondering what this other story is going to be about. Well, I don't want to give too much away, just because I'm weird like that. But I will tell you a little bit about it as I work on it through the month.

Today, I introduced my female lead. Her name is Raelin Tabra, and she is 16. That's all you get for now. :)

Now for the numbers (I'm only writing 6 pages per day, this time. I know that means the story will likely be shorter, but I feel like this first full draft is going to be shorter than the final product anyway. I'm focusing on getting the major points down, then I'll go back and add things like descriptions and smoother transitions and things like that).

Pages: 6 

Total Pages thus Far: 6

Words: 1,744

Total Words thus Far: 1,744