A Piece Of My Heart

Outlining is Hard :-(

Umm ... outline is freaking hard! What the heck, OctoPrep day 11?! You're kicking my butt...

Maybe I'm putting too much pressure on myself because I'm trying to fill in every crack and hole in the story now so that come November, I won't have any hurdles left to overcome. I'm a little wary about this though because what if I solve all my novel's problems through outlining and then the story itself isn't fun to write because I know what'll happen? What I'm doing right now is just giving the story a first pass so that I can begin fitting in the elements that need to happen in the correct places so I don't miss anything when I'm actually writing in November. I'm still kind of hazy on the ending of my story too, which is freaking me out a bit ... A good thing about the outlining is that I can get a high level overview of the story from beginning to end (assuming I finish the outline ) and be able to see where places are at risk of being slow, and where all the twists and reveals are so I can make sure to pace them correctly.

Anyway, we'll see how I go. I plan to work on it regularly and try to do at least a chapter a day, and more on weekends and off days. I've learned though that in the middle especially, I have a lot of things that need to happen, but I don't quite know how they connect yet. So I've started backwards on some parts, writing out the ending of the scene first and then figuring out how I'll get to that point. It's different than anything I've done before (there are those words again), but I want to put in some good work and some good struggle now so I don't freak out in November.

Oh, and I actually signed up for Nano officially! Woohoo! Haven't been placed on a team yet, but I'll have to beg some friends to sponsor me eventually. Jeff has a big goal this year, so I'm excited to jump on the train

And I did some reviews today as well! Finally ... about time I got back into it. I'm not counting those reviews toward my practice word count though just to give myself more of a challenge. With this blog entry, I'm up to an average of 1,490 per day, which would be 44,697 over 30 days. Better than the last update! Getting closer to that magic number! I think in November I'll have to stop blogging though. It'll be hard since it's the official month for the 30DBC, but they'll survive without me.

Ok, gotta go for today. Take care!
-Emily

Draft outline here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AlvhZcLv0H-9Goj8nNPld8ZJppxy7TuEQc9BJ8gB...