August 2023 in writing

As mentioned earlier, I finished my first draft on August 15.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks re-outlining my first POV, tightening the story, keeping the mystery intact by making sure every suspect has something that they’re hiding.

In September I want to write the second draft for the first POV and possibly re-outline the 2nd POV.

Re-outlining

I’m going about this using a number of methods… I have an unpublished blog post draft about this. Today I arranged a bunch of colored Post-Its on my whiteboard.

Focusing on the mystery has helped. Looking at how I can tighten the story: remove locations, combine characters, start stronger, create causal chains of events rather than a shotgun blast of unrelated scenes.

I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to various musings on the creative process and worldbuilding and historical events, letting my mind wander and free associate ideas. We watched True Detective season 1 recently, which was mind blowing. I drew inspiration from it to add grit, tone, and a more opinionated point of view to my story.

(I learned about the accusations of plagiarism today; added Thomas Ligotti to my TBR list.)

I’m not done with the new tightened outline yet. Right now it practically looks like a page 1 rewrite, as if my first draft was the proverbial “telling myself the story”. But I know I can finish it, since I’ve done it before, and I am seriously excited about the ways the story is turning out.

Stats

August’s stats:

Manuscript markdown files: 98
Manuscript words: 102266
Total markdown files: 427
Total words: 259366

I’ve been adding a lot of pages and brainstorming, but I’ve also been pruning and gardening the wiki of old cruft.