I have officially completed fifteen days into my Spring Writing Project. (Note: Today marks Day 16, but I’m not counting it because this blog post is going up before I get a chance to write for the day.) Let’s see how my progress has been going so far:
1.) General Statistics
In regards to word count, I’m doing quite well. Overall, I have written 21,018 words these past two weeks. Considering that my goal was to write at least 1300 words/day, I’m 1518 word ahead of schedule. (So, yes, I have been hitting my daily word count goal every day.)
And since I also keep a record of how long I write each day, I can tell you that I spend an average of 1 hour, 50 mins per day on my project. (If you want to be mathematically precise, the total is 1 hour, 49.8 mins.) Basically, I spend about the same amount of time writing as I do during NaNoWriMo – but writing fewer words. And I’m okay with that. It means that I’m not rushing, that my story is moving at a proper pace.
However, my bedtime schedule has gotten worse because I’m usually awake late at night, writing away. I fall asleep closer to dawn than what I should be doing.
2.) Character Names
Remember how I mentioned in my previous post that I didn’t have any names for my characters? Well, things still have not changed. Literally, only four characters in my entire story have a name. One of those is not the protagonist. (She's referred to as MC - you know, "main character.")
Instead, all of the characters are identified by a sequence of three-letter phrases. Like “qwe” and uio” and “hjk.” (And, yes, I know exactly which characters I just mentioned.) These sequences are also placed within brackets, so I can easily recognize that they are my placeholder names and not a misspelled word.
As for those characters that don’t play too large of a role within the story, I seriously have their name become [firstname#]. The “#” is replaced by an actual number, starting with 1 then 2 then 3 and so on.
Essentially, if someone were to sneak a peek at this story, they’d probably believe that I’m crazy. Why do I have all this gibberish inside so many brackets?
But, hey, the lack of names obviously hasn’t stopped me from moving forward with the story, and that’s all that matters.
Also, I discovered that 22-year-old Amanda was a genius. On the first day of my Writing Project, I pulled out the character list from my last completed manuscript. I had written a fantasy story then, and my current story mostly falls in that genre, so I was hoping it’d generate some ideas on how to go about crafting those “fantasy” names. And on the very bottom of the document, I had described my process on how I created those fictional surnames – complete with a list of Latin words and their meanings to use as a base.
Clearly, I haven’t gotten around to the process of generating first and last names for my characters, but at least I have something to aid me when I do. Past Amanda was so smart to record all of this. And that’s why it’s important to never delete any past creative works. Never know when you’ll need to look back at it.
3.) Plot
For the most part of the past two weeks, I’ve been writing the story linearly, starting from the very beginning. But earlier this week, I hit a snag. I wasn’t exactly sure how to connect the story from where it was to where I wanted it to be once the first major turning point occurred. So I left some space on my Word document, and skipped ahead to begin writing at that first turning point. And I’ve been continuing onward from there.
Of course, I keep meaning to draft a more detailed outline for the overall plot, but I keep pushing it off. Basically, once I start writing every day, I usually have no idea where I’m going with it. I just write, and try to figure it out as I go.
That’s actually my biggest struggle these past fifteen days. Getting myself into the actual act of putting words on the page. The first ten minutes are the hardest, because I don’t know what type of scene to write. But after that, I get my groove, and those two hours of writing fly by quickly. Even if I sometimes have to take a break for a few minutes halfway through in order to figure out what scene I should be (or want to be) writing next.
All things considering, my Spring Writing Project is going well so far. I’m hitting my daily word count goal, and I’m not bored of the story (yet). I also believe that I still have enough material to write for the next month and a half.
Two weeks down, six more to go.
P.S. And in case you were wondering, I did begin reading Book #11 during all of this. WARCROSS by Marie Lu. I’m obviously reading it at a slower pace than I did for the other ten books, but not by much. I started it last Thursday (03/22), and I currently have 32 pages left. Therefore, it should be finished tomorrow. After that, I will be halfway through with completing one of my 2018 New Year’s Resolution goals. (If only the other resolutions were so easy…)
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