Third Draft

The 2nd POV continues.

At the beginning of the month, I was going slowly; I had hit the section of Act Two that I had heavily refactored, so I was largely writing scenes from scratch. I finally caught up to the parts that had largely stayed the same, and I sped up significantly. And then, as of the past week or so, I’ve slowed back down:

• I’m hitting Act 3 and the climactic scenes, which always slow me down.
• Too many distractions and too little sleep! See the cuteness below.

I’ve now finished 66 out of 97 scenes, though there’s one that I really really really want to go back and rewrite. At this rate, I’ll finish editing the third draft by mid- March, giving me some time to do some polishing and wiki gardening during the rest of March, at which I’m hoping to call the third draft done.

Improved tooling

Those of you who have been following along know that I outline the fuck out of everything. But my outlines are a bit longer than they need to be, because of a technical limitation. For instance, if I had

I couldn’t combine those last two beats on the same line, because my tooling only allowed for one Beat to map onto any and all Arcs. Either both Romance and The One would be set to Resolution, or they would both be set to Plot Turn 2.

So… I refactored my scripts to fix that. Now I can

This means I need fewer “duplicate” lines in my outline. I haven’t gone through and cleaned everything up yet, but I’m fairly happy with it.

Copy work

On a whim, I joined the copy work course at Mastering Fiction. I’m not sure if it helped or not, but I did get a lot of practice in various methods of physically writing:

• I practiced my handwriting with fountain pens on paper. My hands grew tense with the fast pace; I began to lean more heavily into cursive.
• I used GoodNotes on my iPad with the Apple Pencil, and realized I enjoyed that.
• I fast touch-typed on my various devices and keyboards, at a rate that I can never reach when I have to both think up and type the words.

I did end up reading/copyworking a short story that hit me right in the feels.

Writing workshops / editing

Hiro and Velvet visited, which was pretty great. They suggested I look at writing workshops to attend after I finish my third draft. I had already been planning to look for professional editing.

I looked at:

• Clarion and Clarion West
• Odyssey
• Lighthouse
• Meetup writers groups
• The Novelry
• Darling Axe

The Clarions are very tempting, especially the original, which is a six week intensive on-site in San Diego. However, they’re for short stories only, and it’s been decades since I’ve even attempted to write a short story.

Right now I’m strongly considering The Novelry’s Big Edit course, but I’m still researching.

Distractions

The inauguration and politics

Not terribly great for focus.

Device distractions

I’ve been going down a rabbit hole looking at linux tablets and 2-in-1 laptops.

I did end up installing and configuring Arch and Hyprland on my ancient Macbook Air 11" from 2014. That was a very fun distraction; I’m enjoying using it.

(It is strange that I’m finally embracing linux on the desktop after my software career, but a) I’m no longer completely burnt out on tech, and b) once I put aside my music and photography hobbies, I don’t have much software that locks me into macOS or Windows.)

Maple!

Remember I was teasing a January distraction? Meet Maple, Rye’s younger sister.

I don’t remember the last time we slept through the night. Or when I had two good nights’ sleep in a row. And she’s a little barky hyperactive terror demon most of the day. But she’ll calm down when she outgrows her puppy phase, and she’s frickin adorable.

Plans for February

Finish the 2nd POV. I do tend to slow down writing/editing the climactic scenes, so we’ll see how fast this goes.

Get a good way into the 3rd POV. This may be my most changed POV of the three; I performed heavy refactoring to get it to work. I’m not sure how fast this will go either.

Still, I’m hopeful I’ll finish the third draft in ~March.

Stats

My word count continues to climb.

Manuscript markdown files: 97
Manuscript words: 156063
Total markdown files: 474
Total words: 438707

I found some more beats in my outline that either didn’t work or could be streamlined. Plus, my new tooling allowed for combining semi-duplicate beats.

End of Draft 2.5:  958 beats, 65 arcs, 93 scenes
End of August:    1088 beats, 70 arcs, 99 scenes
End of September: 1804 beats, 70 arcs, 95 scenes
End of October:   2139 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of November:  2080 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of December:  2063 beats, 63 arcs, 97 scenes
End of January:   2001 beats, 62 arcs, 97 scenes