Preptober

The excitement is building. At least with me.

When I tell others I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, which admittedly aren't many people, they say, "Oh, that's nice," or something equally magnanimous. Which I suppose is better than, "Yeah, right."

Nano prep actually started mid-September and I was thrilled to actually be on time, rather than look up from some video game mid-November and go, "Oh... ". 

Anyone who knows me knows I like to write and have always aspired to be a writer. Well, this year I am determined to kick off my writing career with 50,000 words.

A quiz told me I'm a Plantser with leanings toward the total anarchy of Pantsing. I didn't actually know this and thought all writers wrote like Stephen King until I saw a few YouTube videos about planning and plotting out a novel - which totally scared the beejeebers out of me, by the way - and realized there must be a niche for me.

I decided to follow one of the recommended Plotting Methods and chose the least-amount-of-planning route called Jot, Bin, Pants method.

So far, so good.

I threw in the three Acts so I could more easily find where I was in the story. Their positions in the novel keep shifting but it's all good. Sticky notes are also a hard thing to let go of but at least they're not stuck all over my computer, mirrors, and coffee cups anymore.

Now that October is officially here and my brain is obsessed with this project, I have a couple of important items on the To Do List and those are:

Write Character Profiles - although I feel I've known some of these people for decades.

Create a Map - I have one loosely based on islands of the Caribbean but I want to tweak it.

Create a Rules of Magic manifesto - cuz you can't just pull magic out of your butt and have a deus ex machina moment. I hate those.

I've decided also to re-write the Preface and Prelude (yes, I have both) to better reflect and set up the actual path of the story I've chosen.

This is because over the years, so many different storylines and off-shoots have been knocking around my brain, I had to sort them out, categorize and shuffle them through the colander of sanity and insanity, and have ended up with FOUR possible sequels.

Good God, no wonder I was wallowing; so much material to sift through.

Well, it's all out on 3x5 index cards now - or at least the first book is - and the others are varying degrees of thoughts and ideas, also on index cards that I can use later upon which to base the next part of the story. (She says optimistically)

The re-writing of the first two segments of the book will serve two purposes: To get the damn things knocked into shape, obviously, and also to get myself used to my new Chromebook because its keyboard is a little different than my regular laptop. I want to be able to jump into writing and skim along without having to worry where my fingers are all the time. And the Chromebook is light and portable, unlike my gaming laptop which is like lugging around a large, flat rock.

Cheers!