Playing Catch Up and Calling All Winners!

After a week in which I wrote 8586 words in blog posts (just here–not counting what I’ve done on my cooking blog Pots and Plots), made a major revision and reoutlined the last half of my current WIP, and made a revision/edit pass on the existing 40k of my current WIP, I needed a break yesterday.

Weekend usually means mass cooking in our house because that’s when I do the lion’s share of experimenting for P and P.  We’ve gotten into a round robin Boston butt smoking cookoff with 2 sets of our couple friends and this weekend the butt falls to us.  It also meant mass clean up of the house (because nothing motivates that like having people over) inside and out.  I actually weeded our front flower beds for the first time in about 4 months.  Amazing how much less green everything is WITHOUT the weeds.  I also thought I inadvertantly murdered my vegetable garden when I sprayed it with what I thought was bug spray in our pump sprayer, then remembered that at some point last year that sprayer had held roundup.  But nothing is brown or unhealthy looking this morning, so I think the garden is safe.  WHEW!

I also finished up reading Moon Called last night while the boys were doing their ritual drink, guard the butt, and play guitar routine.  Before that I went back and revisited the last draft of Til Death. This was the draft that I was working on using The Snowflake Method, one of my earliest attempts at outlining.  I was before I discovered GMC or Swain’s scene/sequel construction.  It wasn’t as far along as some of the prior drafts–only about 27k, and as far as I can tell, I have no detailed chapter by chapter outline beyond the 3 page summary of the story.  It’s the thing I abandoned when my current WIP beat me over the head last November.  I’d gotten seriously stalled out (though I can’t remember why), which was why I broke my own commandment and moved on to Hunted in Shadow.  The thing that struck me was how much I really liked what I’d written.  I love the characters, the voice, and the set up I’d achieved in those 8 chapters.  When I go back to it eventually (and it is when, not if), I’ll properly plot out the remainder of the book, and will likely be able to mostly pick up exactly where I left off.  It’s nice to look back and something and not immediately think about all the major revisions I need to do (which is my more normal response to rereading my old work).

Today, however, I’m ready to go through and insert all the easy changes I jotted into the margins of the manscript for HiS.  I’ve been taking my time on it this week, letting all the aftershocks of the major change I made settle into my brain and gel.  I’m up early this morning as the smell of the butt warm in the oven work me up drooling and hungry (the major downfall to smoking meat in the summer–you must do it at night and once it comes in during the wee hours, the scent fills the entire house), so might as well get started on that.  And if I have time later, I’ll either take a nap or start la Nora’s latest.

In any event there are a few winners I haven’t heard from.

I am still waiting to get addresses from Tanya (who has Scrivener) and Stacey Romager!

And the winner of the character cameo in my current (or possibly next WIP) is…Lynn (courtesy of Random.org).  How often do YOU win stuff PBW?  I think I have a nice artist who needs a name.  How do you feel about being a wolf-shifter?

5 thoughts on “Playing Catch Up and Calling All Winners!

  1. hey…sorry I ended up having to work this weekend so missed the post that I had won. yeah!

    just sent you an email…tks again

    tanya

  2. Congratulations on getting your flower bed weeding. I recently pulled most of the weeds and sun damaged plants from my back yard and got the same. I’m glad your vegetables were saved!

    Good luck with the writing. : )

  3. Thanks for these posts! They’ve been a very interesting look at the Dark Side.

    I’m a diehard pantser, and I’ve never encountered the problems associated with pantsing so far (knock on wood). Perhaps it’s because I don’t seem to get weird, out-of-left-field ideas, or maybe it’s because I write YA and all of my novels weigh in at 60k, so the tangents stay under 3k or so, and it’s not so painful to excise a 3k subplot as it might be to excise a 20k subplot.

    Oh wait, I take that back. Last year, during NaNoWriMo, I cut 8k of pure shenanigans mid-month and picked back up where I left off. However, I had only spent 3 days on that tangent, not 3 months, so it didn’t hurt. Much.

    One weakness to pantsing (or at least, my style of pantsing) might be that you only really know your characters when you hit 15k-20k, so the first 15k-20k tends to suck. I’m editing my third novel right now, and there’s a definite lack of action between the 5k mark and the 25k mark.

    However, having to spice up 20k words is the lesser of two evils, as far as I’m concerned. When I tried to plot prior to writing, the novel turned out to be stiff, boring, and unrealistic. I decided what was going to happen in the story with only a superficial knowledge of the people in the story. So, because I already knew what was going to happen to the characters, I never really got to know them. By the end of the novel, I just didn’t care anymore. Plotting totally killed that poor novel.

    Maybe it’s because I come out of NaNoWriMo, where no plot is no problem, but I really just don’t like plotting before writing. Plotting during writing, on the other hand, is fine.

    Thanks for the posts–now I know how to convert to the Dark Side if pantsing ever lets me down. 🙂

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