VELOCITY BLOG 03

There’s this point I’ve reached with a section of the story where it’s starting to look less like a jumble of scenes and more like a cohesive idea. I’ve been churning away at the scenes I already had in my head but interestingly enough, as soon as one is out of my head, another fills it. Like.. right away. It’s weird and also not usual for the way I’ve done things in the past. However I’m chalking it up to two things:

1. Writing Momentum

Over the course of the last year I’ve built momentum by being consistent with writing. At the start of writing Victory or Hope I set my writing session word count goal to 1000 words. This was on the low end of what I knew I was capable of in the big picture, but in the small picture I was struggling, dealing with the effects of insane burnout and I knew that 1000 words would be the top end of what I was able to do. This was a lesson in managing expectations, as well as protecting my injured mental health.

2. Managing Expectations

It’s only in the past month that I’ve started to feel the effects of burnout finally schlepping away. It’s hard to be one of those people that knows just how much they can achieve in a small span but also knowing that I was hindered.  When I was finishing Forces: In Search of Power I had a writing vacation where I wrote close to 40,000 words in the span of three days. I KNOW WHAT I CAN DO. But burnout is a tricky beast. I set my writing session word count goal knowing that it was on the bottom end of my capabilities but also at the high end of what I was currently capable of. To manage 1000 words a day AND make it consistent would give longevity to my overall writing practice. I thought to myself “If I can manage this, I can finish a book in 100 days”. I have anywhere from 2 to 4 writing sessions a week based on other extenuating factors. I did it. It took over half the year to do but I did it.

Writing my stories is a form of necessary medicine for me, and when that is in balance then so is everything else. And now that everything else is falling into place I’m starting to feel like the high end of my capability is closer to 2000. So as of starting on Velocity I’ve moved my minimum session WC of 2000 and anything more than that is awesome.

So with those two things, my momentum is in a better place than any other point in my writing career so far. My brain is primed for creation, and also I’ve been jotting down notes and Sandboxing through various parts of Velocity for the last two years. So my initial plan to outline as soon as I was done writing scenes has been put on hold, at least until my brain quits churning out more scenes to write.

The section I’m currently working on is probably going to be the shortest of the three, so as I’m in the process of drafting it I’m also thinking about the very important factors of WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

If you recall in a previous Velocity Blog, I mentioned that I “write out of order, jumping about with reckless abandon.” There’s a weird clarity to doing this, because I’m seeing the beginning of this character’s journey in this book and also the end.

One of my favorite pieces of writing advice is that “the end should inform the beginning and vice versa” and so I think about that a lot in terms of what it is I’m trying to say with a piece of work. I always consider the end of a story just as important, if not more so, than the beginning so they go hand in hand when I’m plotting and planning. And as I’m jotting down the trillion little scenes that keep coming to me, it seems that the pieces are coming together for me, and I’m working in-tandem with scene writing to also outline the emotional steps of this part of the story.

Over the next handful of writing sessions I’ll likely be drafting the end of the book with reckless abandon, I’ve already got the end figured out, the end of the major plot arc anyway so next will be figuring out the individual plot arcs. I have four characters POVs and now Kinetics has officially entered its ensemble cast era.

THANKS FOR READING!

SKELETON DRAFT PROGRESS

-SCENES (Currently sitting at 15,000 words)

-OUTLINE (Got a basic thing written out)

-DIALOGUE (weirdly not as much solo dialogue, I think I finally learned my lesson to not leave huge reams of dialogue without context)