Hey, Hey Good Lookin' - Whatcha Got Cookin'?

One of my goals right now is to cook more often, and so when I sat down to write this goals post the only I could come up with was this song. So of course I had to look it up...

Bring back memories for anyone? I'm not that old (not calling you old, calling me young :P) but my Daddy used to ask my Mom that question all the time, and even sing from time to time!

So how am I doing on my goals? Well...

Writing:
1. Five hours editing a week. I'm at 3:10 right now! I'm very happy with that. I'm actually ahead of the game! Granted, it's only by 10 minutes, but I was behind schedule last week, and never reached my goal, so this is super fantastic.

2. Blog on a regular basis. Monday: Giveaway post (go enter!), Tuesday: Creative Writing Post, Today: your reading it!

3. Write book reviews and post on GoodReads.com. Four so far! I'm not caught up yet, but at least I'm up to writing about the books I read this month! One of the reviews is in Monday's post... in fact it's the book I'm giving away! (hint, hint)

4. Read and comment on at least 5 other blogs. Check!

Life:
1. Put more variety in our diets. That above picture is last nights dinner. Left over burrito meat cooked up with some scrambled eggs and cheese, topped in salsa and olives, served on a tortilla (and rolled up, but this is prettier)! Super yummy. Tonight's dinner was a newish recipe (old favorite ingredients, new combination) but of course I forgot to take a picture of that!

2. Clean/Organize the house. I cleaned! A little bit. The house is still a mess in general, but the bathroom is clean! And a little bit of the mess is gone.

3. Exercise! I've been doing more stretching, and the cleaning is counting as exercise this week. Believe me, my knees are feeling it.

4. Take more pictures. I think the above picture of dinner is the only picture of any worth I've taken this week so far (the one's of my husband when I was picking on him don't count) but hey, that's one good picture. I'll take it.

See that pretty picture? Ok, so maybe it doesn't look so pretty to everyone else. Especially since I have gone through and blurred the text in the center. But that my friends, is the ready to go file for the second draft of Misfits!

Woohoo!

I finally finished the overly long process of taking all the changes I made on the paper copy and putting them in the new digital copy. This required lots of copy and pasting text, putting it in a different order (in many cases) than I wrote it, typing up the outline I created, typing notes into the text and highlighting them, and lastly, making sure all my references pages were in the new work-from file. Oh and for the heck of it I alphabetized, color coded, and labeled everything.

My OCD side was very happy when I was done.

It took way longer to do all this than I expected, but I figured out some more things about my story along the way, and I know the next phases of the the process are going to be much easier because of this phase, so I'm happy.

So what is next? Well I was going to tell you rewriting is next, but I realized yesterday that I need to do some more world building and character building before I tackle the rewrite. I started in on that today, and I'm not sure how long it's going to take me, but I know the book will be better for it in the end, so I press on!

How is your writing going?
~ Ruthie ~

WIP Update - Constructive Destruction

***Warning, today's blog is full of pictures, but worth it!***

Thursday I posted about finishing the outlining process for my current WIP. I had gone through, marked each scene, and created flash cards to go with them. This is what happened next:

That's my book! Laid out scene by scene! All 91 scenes originally written! The reason there are some gaps is that some scenes did not contain complete pages. While this looks pretty, I quickly discovered it took up too much space to be practical. The goal was to lay out the book in order to contemplate the order of scenes and chapters, and while I might have been able to do that if I had laid it out on a bunch of tables (maybe set up in a square with me in the middle?), my floor just wasn't cutting it. So I gathered them back into a pile,  but I was still thinking the floor, so I spread them out a few scenes at a time around my knees.

That didn't last long. My joints don't like the floor that much, and I realized that I only needed to look at a handful of scenes at a time, so a table would do. Gathering up my supplies, I moved again.

A few scenes laid out to work on.

Like the card table? It's probably from the 70's... 

I used my tray table to put the manuscript piles. 

On the right, scenes to work on, on the left, completed ones paper clipped into chapters.

I loved watching the second pile grow!

In the middle of moving things around.

Since I don't outline first, I found this process really helpful. Especially because I wrote the first draft using alternating points of view (POV). It worked well at first, but by the time I had added in the rest of the adventurers, it just wasn't working well. I also realized, as I was reading through it, that I changed POV way too frequently. It felt like good long breaks in between each character as I was writing it, but reading? I'd change almost every page! That's just too confusing! 

I'm switching to using an omniscient narrator for at least the majority of the book, and that means I need to reorganize the order of some of the early scenes (where my characters were in two different places) and there was a little bit of shuffling through out the rest as well. Mostly in the chapter breaks. I kept my chapters at a pretty consistent word length during writing (it helped me to set goals and meet them) and had some horrible breaks as a result. I know that these might not be the "final" chapter breaks, but I think how I have them divided up currently will make the editing process much easier. Want too see how the final chapters look?

Isn't it pretty? Each chapter is marked with a sticky note in the top right, and has the 3x5 cards that matched the scenes in the top left corner. I'm currently working on taking the original draft and copying it into pages in a new Scrivener file in the order that I've rearranged things. Then I'll edit it chapter by chapter, with the old text and the new text in side by side windows. I have a list of things I want to remember in this edit, and I'll include those the best I can while changing the point of view. It'll be challenging, but it's also fun to watch the book evolve!

I'll probably do this with future WIP's as well, although hopefully they will need a little less work between first and second drafts! It still helped a lot with chapter and flow, and I liked being able to pick things up and move them around. I think a longer table would be nice though. Maybe I'll get a study room at one of the libraries next time!

~ Ruthie ~ 

Ps. How are your WIP's going?