Time Yesterday: 1 hour
Time This Week: 1 hour

I have made miserable efforts at trying to write of late. My goal is to have chapter (or, more precisely, scene) outlines ready for the beginning of June so that I can start work on the second draft of book one, and I have done some good work on that, but it has been very fragmented. The worst of it has been the head cold and laryngitis that I suffered from for most of the last week. Very frustrating.

I have outlines for about a sixth of the scenes I have planned so far. More work needed.

However, one benefit of being too sick to do anything useful is that I have caught up with some television that I was beginning to think I would never see: Heroes. I've watched almost all of season one over the last week, and greatly enjoyed it. I am looking forward to seeing the season finale, and although I have heard that the series rather declines in seasons two and three I am still looking forward to seeing the rest of what's been made. I am also sad that the story won't now be concluded. Not as brutal an ending as to Firefly, but still disappointing.

One thing that annoys me about the show is how the superhumans all have different powers. Not only that, but superhumans who have children then have superkids who have completely different powers from their own.

That kind of bugged me about The Incredibles too, but there again the mechanism for superness was never explored in that story, whereas in Heroes they posit mutation of a small number of genes. Why the high rate of mutation though? Why would someone super strong and someone with matter phasing ability produce a child with the ability to hack computers with their mind?

But the stories are interesting and the setting is rich so I don't really mind that much.

And maybe I can get some more writing done too.

Time Yesterday: 1 hour
Time This Week: 1 hour

The story arcs for the individual characters are looking pretty good. The key insight was in thinking about what the character's problems were at the start of the story - what is it that they are trying to overcome in their life? That gives the story arc some energy and makes constructing the story much more interesting. There are still timing elements to work on, but I will shake those out in the chapter outlines.

I was using index cards for the scene and character work, as well as making notes on setting. Sometimes working with physical artifacts is the right thing to do, but I try very hard not to get too bogged down. There's a term from software (which also pops up in business practice) - analysis paralysis: continuing to draw diagrams and break down the details of the solution when you're past the point when it is a useful activity - the analysis documents are not the product, after all.

In my development work, I try to do just enough modelling and analysis to get me to the core of the software problem; in writing it means using a tool to get me past a creative block. In both cases I want to be writing the product (code or words) in preference to the scaffolding. Unless the scaffolding is a deliverable, there's no final value to it.

So having used the cards to force myself to think about the problem, I will now go on to doing scene and chapter outlines in a brand new second draft document. And then I will start writing the second draft.

See you in 100,000 words.

I have been effectively taking a break from the hour-a-day writing that I was doing since we were away for ten days in April. It would have been nice if that trip hadn't completely sabotaged the month's writing, but it rather did.

However, I have been doing some novel work this last week, in two areas: research and plotting.

The research has been a continuation of my investigation of orbital mechanics and object visibility in space, while the plotting is looking at each viewpoint character's story in isolation and trying to figure out things like timing.

It has brought me to the nub of the novelling experience: are the character's stories interesting?

I have a multi-viewpoint story. Looking at the novel as a whole I considered that the story as a whole was pretty interesting. But if each individual character's story is not very interesting then I run into a problem, one that goes back to Frodo Baggins in the wilderness of Mordor: good novels get hurt by boring bits.

I've been working with index cards (sometimes using physical props is a good idea) and writing short character and scene descriptions on them then sorting by character. This led me to write down the individual story arcs on cards, and it just makes me wonder about what I can do to make some of the stories more interesting.

But that is the kind of thing that writing is about really, isn't it?

Time Today: 1 hour
Time This Week: 2 hours

Having figured out some good things about the setting, I have been trying to work a bit more on the characters and the plot.

I have three main characters (which may seem excessive to some, but is a common device in science fiction and fantasy). I have a pretty clear idea of what each character is for, but am a good deal less clear on how ell each character fulfills their role.

So I have been thinking of more intense plot points, and it seems to be going quite well. I am hoping that this will make the book more compelling to read.

Time Today: 30 mins 1 hour
Time This Week: 30 mins 1 hour

Last week was way better than the week before.

I didn't do exactly what I had planned on, but I spent the time I had wanted to on setting detail which sparked a cascade of other ideas. Some ideas I'd had before the orbital mechanics apocalypse were swept away as infeasible, while others have become yet more profound.

Very pleasing.

I also dug out a day book to carry. It's not quite at the point of having earned its keep, but I've done the right thing of writing things down and then reading them back before pouring them into a text file for further rumination.

Today has not been so hot so far: I've been very tired from excess sugar yesterday, and I am just drained right now. I was going to work on timelines for the characters, but that is a difficult activity when I am this whacked so I am going to see about some more social ruminations instead. See how that goes, but if I fall asleep in my keyboard then I will go to bed instead.

Update - ruminations continued quite fruitfully, made my time goal for the day.

Time Since Last Post: 1 hour
Time This Week: 4 hours

I continue to suffer the imaginative ructions caused by my revelations on orbital mechanics and relict technologies. Lovely. This stuff is fun! And I am looking forward to starting a fresh draft in June or so - I still have to figure out some timelines and plot arcs before that, though.

On another subject, I have already posted this on Facebook but wanted to add some more commentary on an interesting process post from Antony Johnston. I quite like his process, if only because he seems to need as much review and rewriting of tasks and notes as I do. The thing is that he actually does it.

I recognised a long time ago that I need to rewrite todo lists (not, in fact, that I necessarily do so) but I had never really thought about how that applies to my writing. Having a notepad with me is also something that I have practiced pretty consistently for some years, but I have been keeping separate notepads for actions and ideas. The actions pad is a small disposable thing, the ideas notebooks have always been more impressive and durable items.

I have recently not been carrying an ideas pad, because I didn't use it. Why? Because I was constraining what I should write in it. A typical first page would be some note on how a particular kind of idea should go into it, or how only good handwriting or a fine pen should be used (a fine indicator of a historically poor hand right there). The primary lesson of NaNoWriMo is to not edit before writing. And I never reread things either: if I should have learned anything from Getting Things Done it's that review is the point. Without review things effectively haven't happened.

So, time to get back to having an ideas book to carry around and to actually write in it, but also time to implement a process for what happens to ideas once they're in the book.

As I say, this stuff is fun. Time to get back to having some of it.

Update - and Getting Things Written is really interesting too: ideas for making GTD work for writers (or at least for the writer Antony Johnston). Very striking, since he hits so many of the points that I have struggled with in making GTD work for me.

Time Today: 1 hour
Time This Week: 3 hours

Last week was totally useless, novel-wise. I finished off the gazetteer and immediately ran out of steam.

This week has at least been better. I have been thinking about important structural elements of the system my world is part of which has led to lots of research into orbital mechanics and some gutter trigonometry.

I've also realised that the basic back story point I was using to justify certain superscience artefacts can easily be used to justify one more that helps enormously with long nights and frightening days.

So no more words, but a lot more progress towards a coherent story in a more or less plausible setting.