Shadows Update

As you might have noticed, I've gotten a little sidetracked what with this being November and with NaNo and everything, but that does not mean I plan to leave Shadows to gather dust. My goal this month is to write and polish the submission package to prepare for a December start.

So this week I had as my goal to write a synopsis. Imagine my delight to discover (unremembered) that I had already completed not one but several synopses for Shadows of the Sun earlier this year in both my Forward Motion synopsis class and the OWW synopsis focus.

Only trouble is that none of them sounded any good.

So yesterday, after a despairing look at what I had, I went and wrote a brand new one using my latest draft of the novel in which the overarching theme/plot is much clearer from the start. I still have to polish it, and compare to the other drafts to confirm this is, in fact, better, but it's progress.

I didn't like the query blurb either, so I guess that's next on the chopping block :p. If all goes well, though, I'll have a submission package ready to go out just when agents shut down for the holidays. That, however, is not a problem for me. I'd be happy to wait a bit on the responses because I have other things to get polished and out the door still this year.

NaNo Week 2 Update

We're almost done with the second week of NaNo, and it has been going very well. My outline has grown hardly at all, now totaling 10,410 with 34 scenes (only two more than a week ago). I've been sitting on my laurels where that's concerned and only the average scene length has improved my estimate which will (assuming scenes meet the average) take me to 49k. Obviously I still have some outline work to do.

Now you'd think I have all the time in the world to work on that outline. After all, it's only the 13th so I've got lots of time to get to 50k. Well, that's true, but it doesn't reflect my current reality. I'm averaging about 2000-2200 a day, and I'm heading into a marathon for the weekend (Forward Motion runs word count marathons every weekend throughout November). My current count is 33,197 words. That means I have 15,877 words left in the scenes in my outline, and I could easily put away that many words between now and Tuesday if things go well.

At least this weekend's marathon is the standard one, so though my outline words don't count for NaNo, I can still get marathon credit to encourage me to flesh out a bit more. It would be nice to have an outline that goes all the way to the end of the book since my progress is such that I might actually make it. I'm not counting on such an explosion however.

The good news is that the second section of the book is one for which I have more scenes (albeit rough ones) already. The third section, however, is hardly scoped at all beyond the very general synopsis.

Regardless, I jumped into NaNo with a fresh idea from about October 18th, a self-imposed edit deadline that had to be met before I could start NaNo so no time to outline, and a year of having written almost nothing. I could so easily have crashed and burned. To be honest, I'm feeling a little draggy as it is, another reason to front load so if I crash halfway, I'll already have my purple bar (it's all about the purple :)). With all that going against me, my progress is phenomenal and I'm happy with it.

That's not to say I haven't had my moments. I've pushed through them so far, and am working under the pressure of pure gumption rather than being drawn to write a lot of the time, but ultimately when I can get myself to focus, the words do come. I've got a very tight knit group of three characters who are recovering, growing, and learning about each other quite nicely. Whether or not this will be some grand opus, whether or not it lingers in my "to edit" pile for much too long, there's no question that I'm producing a novel here :).

Now if only I had a remotely reasonable title :P. If it hadn't been almost the same as a movie, the right title would be While I Was Sleeping, but that's taken so...