Today’s stats:
Words written: 189
Hours slept: 3… and then a 3 hour “nap”
Shoulder status: 100% less stabby
Everything else status: feels like something kicked me and I fixed it with chocolate and blanket cocoons (…could be worse!)
I wrapped up the chapter I was on, at least!
Some of these chapters… well, I already know I’m going to shuffle my chapter breaks around a fair bit, especially in the beginning. The first few chapters, I actually wrote without chapter breaks, back when MMPC was a Secret Project and I wanted to find out if it was going to work for me before I got my writer’s group attached to the idea. As a result, they don’t have cool hooks the way I normally try to put in when I break for chapters, and several of them just break when Melody goes to bed. Boringgggg! I could cut at a random line and it’d be better than that >:p
I prefer to end on a joke, or the character preparing to do something really cool, or something dangerous happening, or at least a cool piece of place description that feel immersive and magical so you want to explore more.
This chapter got the “about to make progress” style of hook, and it also ended on a minor emotional beat that resonated nicely with the rest of the chapter. That’s a good place to cut the chapter!
Anyway. Half my official wordcount for “today” is actually an editing note-to-self, because I sat down to write about half an hour ago and realized I needed to pull the chapter to a close, and also I needed a quick note about something for continuity purposes. Rereading past chapters for reference, I rediscovered a Chekhov’s Gun I put on the wall eleven chapters ago, which actually breaks continuity for part of the climax if I leave it in.
Fortunately, it’s easy to remove–but I’m not doing that right now, because if I go back, I’ll start editing the whole chapter and then it’s just a time sink. And we don’t need that during the normal writing process, let alone NaNo!
That’s why my draft work is littered with bracketed notes to myself [like this]. The effect, for my writing group (who actually get to read my first drafts as I’m writing them), isn’t dissimilar to those goofy author’s notes in old fanfics. Anyone remember those? They used to be more common, or perhaps I was just on different sites. Archive Of Our Own users seem to mostly stick to beginning/end of chapter notes, which is definitely an improvement in reading flow.
I was on Quizilla back when that was a website. It was basically like uquiz, except 1) it also had a section for stories, 2) it didn’t pretend anyone was going to use it for actual data gathering or business purposes, and 3) its content was… more PG-13 than uquiz sometimes gets xD which was definitely a good thing, since I’d estimate that the average age of its user base was twelve.
I met a beta reader on there who taught me a lot; I think she was only slightly older than me. She was ahead of me on the skill curve, and some of her old writing that she hated, I actually loved. All those flowery fantasy tropes, and heroines with raven dark hair who stood by their window gazing listlessly at the moon and thinking about how hard their life was… she really didn’t like this old work. I did, although I later figured out why she found it embarrassing. Specifically, I’d seen a lot of “beautiful girl character does almost nothing for the first three chapters” stories before on Quizilla, but I thought her prose in particular was gorgeous. She cared about it.
Dear reader, whether you’re eight or eighteen or eighty–someone looks up to you, and they can tell how much you care about your work. Keep going.
Wordfully yours,
–Jade