Workshop Update

I wrote Sky is Falling, Chapter 3 in about 50 minutes.

Life & Mad World Progress

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should, I’m always tweeting about writing lately), then you’ll notice I’ve been posting about getting closer to the ending of the first draft of Mad World. It’s going so well for me that I actually moved around a due date for a paper at school. I get to pick the week I want to write a paper, and I had planned on this week because my Tuesday and Wednesday classes were cancelled in the evening.

And then Mad World started working, and I thought…I could finish this first draft this week if not for this paper. So…yeah. I made what a lot of my people in my life would say was an irresponsible decision to put my fanfiction first. But it’s not just as simple as putting fanfiction first, it’s putting me first. My creativity. My happiness. This project is going so much better than the last few (how long did it take me to get to 17 chapters in The Best Thing?) This is going back to A Few Words territory where I wrote that sucker in a month and ignored everything else. When I let my creativity be in charge, it’s good for me.  Even my classwork is going faster because I’m concentrating more evenly, devoting time to everything that matters so I’m just…happier.

I tweeted about it this as well, but part of the reason I’m feeling more settled in my priorities is a podcast called Big Strong Yes from Chipperish Media. It’s a book club that reads self-help books, but not the normal ones. We just finished Rising Strong by Brene Brown, and if you’ve ever read it, you’re going to see a lot of that book reflected in Mad World. I owe a huge debt for Elizabeth’s characterization and her therapy. She’s going through the Rising Strong process in this novel. We’ve just started Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert which is devoted to creativity, and I’m just already excited by it. So if you’re like me, and you’re constantly putting what makes you happy on the back burner or struggling with priorities, this podcast might be good for you.

Okay, promotion aside, what does it mean that Mad World is nearly finished? I’m finishing the Discovery Draft, which is me turning off the inner editor. In July, when I was writing for Camp NaNoWriMo, I kept letting myself get stuck on scenes, rewriting scenes. I spent three days on Chapter 8 and while I like the changes, it really set me back time wise. I’m used to polishing chapters as I go, getting them as close to publishable as possible before going on to the next. It’s how I wrote The Best Thing, All We We Are, and the first two chunks of Bittersweet and Mad World. It’s not a bad thing, but it does slow down my writing process and sometimes I lose the momentum. So a discovery draft is me turning that off and just writing, which means I get the big parts done.

That being said, Mad World needs a bit a work. There’s some scenes that need to be written, an entire subplot I need to write, another I need to finish, so I’m thinking to take most of October to do that. It might go slower, it might go faster. I don’t know. I’ll keep you guys updated on that process.

Site Maintenance

Also, I tried to mess with the subscriptions plug in so you no longer get every single post I make — just these summary ones on the main page, which will cut down on the amount of email you’ll receive. Let me know if you typically receive emails and aren’t getting any since I’m testing it.

There are still broken links from the change over to Fiction Workshop format. I hope to ferret those out this week and fix them. I’ll keep you posted on that as well.

I also think I’ve fixed the share options, so posts should share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (which…exists but I don’t use much)

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