Read this on galpod.com.
It’s the new school year, and there are two kids in Secondary School in this household. This means adjusting to new people, new routines, and new systems. It also means I have more time, both because school hours are longer by two hours and because they are starting not to *want* me to do things for them. It means I’m really out of excuses, and I need to get writing.
So, my goal for this school year is to finish the first draft of the book I’m working on, currently sporting the terrible working title Heritage. It’s a good goal, but it is a big task. So, I’m breaking it down into smaller tasks. Right now, I have about 19k words, but I’m starting to lose the threads a bit. Beginning to write was a good decision before because I needed to get the voices and characters down. But before I continue, I must write scene cards for all scenes. The scene cards help me figure out what needs to happen for the story to have the arc I want. I will colour code them by character so I can keep track of each character’s arc — I have four characters, and they each learn something different. That should take about a month of solid work, so I should finish before the half term.
The next stage would be to write the scenes. That would be the rest of the year, putting words together. If we take the 80k words as a benchmark, I have 61k or so words left. I’ve got eight weeks on the second half term before December starts to get crazy. Then another 13 weeks in the winter, and another 11 weeks in the spring. That’s 32 weeks, meaning I need to write just under 2k words a week to be on track. It’s not too much, but neither is it an insignificant amount.
So that’s the plan. By July 2023, I should have a solid first draft of this book. I’ll keep you posted.
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