by katehowley1
National Novel Writing Month is fast approaching and I am determined to finish this year. I have tried in the past but I had a lot of things working against me, all of which aren’t in play this year. I have a good feeling about it. Here are some things I am doing differently!
Changed up my outline format.
I have struggled over the years with deciding if I am and pantser or a plotter. I feel like I am a combination of both, especially since I didn’t outline any of The One-Horned Heretic and I flew through writing that series. It was the easiest thing I’ve written!
For my novels, though; they are complex. Not complicated! Complex. I have pay-offs that I have to plan books ahead of time so I definitely needed to outline. At first I started with a Word-doc, but that left me too much room to thought dump enormous paragraphs where I should be outlining with one-liners. Then I tried an Excel spreadsheet and it made my head hurt. Since I use Excel religiously at my job, I definitely don’t want to use it during my fun writing time too!
Finally, I decided on, at least for the first go-around, a storyboarding approach much like how Jenna Moreci uses. You can see below how I did it. Each board is one character, since my story is told from multiple perspectives. I wrote out each scene I know so far, and they are generally organized vertically as Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3. I was so stunned at how much better I was able to brainstorm! Now I can physically see where the plot holes are. I couldn’t visualize that in a Word or Excel doc.
Let’s not talk about the orange one…she is giving me trouble…
Established my daily routine.
Normally I would go to the gym in the morning, work all day at my desk and then sit in the same desk and work on my writing. I noticed that after sitting for eight hours, I wouldn’t get as much done as I thought I could even though I had a good chunk of time after work to write. I swapped my routine, so now I write in the morning, work a full day, go to the gym for an hour, and then write at night.
This was so important for me since now I will have a daily word-count goal to get to each day for National Novel Writing Month. I can split up my sitting-time and writing-time with my day job and the gym so I don’t get burnt out!
Releasing The Remnant before November 1st!
This was super important! I didn’t want to be thinking about my edits or my release at all in November so I can concentrate fully on my first novel. Now that I am releasing part two of The One-Horned Heretic on October 31st, I can market it throughout November, which is eons easier than writing or editing two pieces at once!
The One-Horned Heretic Updates
I am 100% on track to release part two, The Remnant, on October 31st. I can’t help but laugh at myself…part three is also finished! Having a complete story feels incredible. Part three is unpolished, obviously, and far from finished, but it was really good to get it all out of my head in time for NaNoWriMo.
As always, thank you for reading and following along on my journey! Check out all this other junk below if you want to read more:
“The Price” is out now!
Read my first piece of published fiction, Part 1 of The One-Horned Heretic, a dark fantasy series for $.99 on Amazon! Is anything even $.99 anymore? What a steal.
Lily Hammer Writing 