Challenged
My progress on A.C. and Phoenix has been slower than I would like it to be. Granted, a lot of that was the physical problems that literally slowed me down and forced me to bed. Without a laptop, doing any kind of writing was particularly hard. With my iron levels as low as they were, it isn't any surprise that all I wanted to do was sleep. So, I'm not kicking myself at being so far behind on either book, but I am disappointed in general. I was hoping to be finalizing v6 of A.C. by now and getting it off the beta readers. Instead, I'm still floundering my way through v4/5. And I had hoped to be working on v3 revisions of Phoenix by now, but I don't even have a rough draft done. Like I said, it couldn't be helped—being sick for 8 months took a lot of wind out of my sails, so to speak.
So the first thing I've done to help myself out is to readjust my goals for the two books for this year. I'd like to just get the v4/5 version done for A.C. And a rough draft for Phoenix would be nice, though I suspect that might be pushing it a bit. I may have to be content with just getting the building draft done plus a whole lot of world building.
Which brings up a point quite briefly: just because you're writing in the same world doesn't mean no more world building. In this case I need a whole bunch of different locations developed and I'm in a different time period than A.C. So, yea, a lot more world building on my end. The good news is that most of the basics are pretty set: magic, the gods, and so on, giving me a ready foundation for what I need to do for the other book.
Anyway, the second thing I'm doing to help get me going is to sign up for some challenges through my writing group. Now, admittedly, I do this every time they hold a challenge, but I decided to join into this one a bit differently than in the past: I've focused my challenge choices so they apply to these two novels, especially A.C. Now I do have a critique challenge in there, but the other two are novel revisions and world building specifically. Neither has a high goal at the moment, but I will push them higher if I can. I won't know if I can until I'm close to completing the ones I have: revise 7 chapters in 8 weeks and do 24k in world building. I had to resist adding other goals that could derail me by giving me too much to do—I need to keep my focus on the two novels at hand and what I need to finish for them.
The one down side is that I've cut my weekly word count goal for Phoenix itself, the reason being that I need the world building before I can go too much further into developing the book itself. That's part of what the building draft is all about: pulling together the information you need for descriptions and whatnot and putting all of it in the where it's needed. When you get to the rough draft stage later, it's just a matter of working the details in that you need where you need them and spreading them out a bit.
Trust me, it works, for me anyway.
My weekly and daily goals are now adjusted a little to make the challenge goals the priority. I'm actually not too worried about the world building stuff. Between the two books, if I can't come up with 24k, then I'm just being lazy. REALLY lazy. But the revisions do worry me. I'm in the last 11 chapters, yes, but I'm also in the chapters that are going to require the most change. Some are going to see drastic cuts. Others are just plain going to have to be rewritten. I suspect in the end I'll have 8 or 9 chapters instead of 11, but the chapter a week thing just may not happen with the amount of work that needs to be done to get there. But I guess that's kind of what challenges are all about: you reach for something you're not quite sure you can make and hope you actually do get there. If they were all easy, it wouldn't be a challenge, right?
