quote:Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).
What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them? Describe what you worked on. Set goals for next week. Did you learn something during this week?
Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).
Writing on a novel Characterization World Building Relevant research
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As for me:
Last Week's Goals:
DUAL MAGICS SERIES: As time permits, go through the x-ray listings for the Dual Magics boxed set and THE BARD'S GIFT. This is here to remind me that eventually I need to get back to this.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING/BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM: Promote through social media. I now have two books on social media marketing. So . . . I need to schedule some time to read them. Some.
MAGE STORM: I need to rethink a few things about the beginning of this one. Making some progress.
MEADOWSWEET: Start work on this one while I mull over what's wrong with MAGE STORM. Started. Barely.
DUAL MAGICS SERIES: As time permits, go through the x-ray listings for the Dual Magics boxed set and THE BARD'S GIFT. This is here to remind me that eventually I need to get back to this.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING/BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM: Promote through social media. I now have two books on social media marketing. So . . . I need to schedule some time to read them.
MAGE STORM: Move forward. Try to build momentum.
MEADOWSWEET: Continue to work on this one whenever MAGE STORM stops my forward momentum.
List of published books just to remind me of all the things I should be paying at least some attention to:
Blood Will Tell (Chimeria #1) Blood Is Thicker (Chimeria #2) Fire and Earth The Bard's Gift Daughter of the Disgraced King The Shaman's Curse (Dual Magics #1) The Voice of Prophecy (Dual Magics #2) Beyond the Prophecy (Dual Magics #3) War of Magic (Dual Magics #4) Become: To Catch the Lighting (Become #1) Become: To Ride the Storm (Become #2)
I need to schedule something for the Become series. It'd help if they had any reviews.
Posted by Grumpy old guy (Member # 9922) on :
Did I misplace a day, or something?
Phil.
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
No. I got a little ahead of myself. Not that it really matters that much in goal-setting.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
The concertina-crowned cyclone fence cage 3-D scene map -- wow. Now oriented for the scene. Not much of a fan for storyboard software, though, too enclosed for my sensibilities.
I also created an exercise for a visual aid-oriented frame perspective. Assemble a "picture frame" that approximates human vision: depth perception, field of view, and focal length, width, and height. Hold the frame close for macro close-ups, and at arms' length for distance view. This is similar to directors' viewfinders and fine-art artists' framework methods.
Though so far only "played with," this frame method promises great scene visualizations from insider looks out viewpoints. I've already noticed a mental image process improvement, that looks out from rather than in on a viewpoint persona.
Posted by WarrenB (Member # 10927) on :
Finally, some traction on The Book of Dreams (working title): I am now about 5.8% into Draft 1... :-)
The characters are starting to feel more alive and more familiar, though I worry that I'm drawing too heavily on my own experience...First-novel-as-thinly-veiled-autobiography syndrome? (I hope not!)
The main settings are slowly resolving. And I'm getting enthused about writing as a learning process -- not only about craft, but also about the way connections between ideas and motifs form unconsciously/semi-consciously, but can then be woven in and developed as I go along... An exciting and strangely satisfying unfolding.
I have abandoned -- for now -- the idea of writing directly (and chronologically) into my structure/outline. After initially being very helpful, that became a bit of a hindrance since I don't yet have a completely clear picture of every plot point, detail, sequential element. So, I'm adopting a more fragmentary approach: produce material (rough/decent/whatever) and then see how it relates to the structure and overall story-arc.
Feeling more positive about this -- I have begun, after a fairly sow and fallow January! Now just ninety-thousand words, or so, to go... And then, I'm pretty sure, a LOT of rewriting...
Posted by Grumpy old guy (Member # 9922) on :
Just remember, a first draft is where you sort out all your ideas: good, bad, outlandish, fanciful and so on. Then you use your first draft to come up with a preliminary outline and toss all previous work in the bin. Never go back to it. It's done its job, now let it rest in peace.
Phil.
Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :
quote:Originally posted by Grumpy old guy: Just remember, a first draft is where you sort out all your ideas: good, bad, outlandish, fanciful and so on. Then you use your first draft to come up with a preliminary outline and toss all previous work in the bin. Never go back to it. It's done its job, now let it rest in peace.
Phil.
That's one method. Not everyone works in the same way.
Posted by Grumpy old guy (Member # 9922) on :
Of course, Meredith. Each to their own.
Phil.
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
quote:Originally posted by WarrenB: So, I'm adopting a more fragmentary approach: produce material (rough/decent/whatever) and then see how it relates to the structure and overall story-arc.
Odd that a discretionary use of "decent," to mean adequate, okay, fair (quantity and quality, instead of moral aptitude), etc., has become a hallmark of a generational age cohort, and a perhaps apt use for a generation's character presentation in narrative. One word, a "telling detail," among several, that says much with less.
Posted by WarrenB (Member # 10927) on :
What's the cohort, extrinsic? (I want to see if I'm in it, or languaging out of bounds. :-)
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
Post Boomer generation, more so Millennial than Generation X though those and later day Boomers used the term to mean adequate quantity and quality, circa mid 1970-ish middle grade and young teen youth and later youths. Like the word "ironic" used instead of coincidence or sarcasm labels, and other words like it, such discretionary uses age out for many, once noticed those are nonfinite or indefinite and associated with an age phase cohort. Exceptions abound, like mundane to mean dull.
Posted by WarrenB (Member # 10927) on :
Well, I was born in 1976, so Gen X, I guess.
An interesting observation about language drift.
Though this usage does accord with 'meaning 2' in the dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, M-W, etc.) -- so I'd have thought it in general use and kinda canonical?
Posted by extrinsic (Member # 8019) on :
And Webster's collegiate 11th and Wiktionary4. Uses expanded from 1539 to present day. Dictionaries may rank definitions and connotations by date of coin or quantity of common usage and no clear distinctions among which. The earliest English usage meant proper to one's station and is now obsolete. The John Milton poem "Il Penseroso," 1645, uses the term to mean comely, handsome, beautiful, also now obsolete:
"Oft in glimmering bowers and glades He met her, and in secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, Whilst yet there was no fear of Jove. Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train, And sable stole of cypress lawn Over thy decent shoulders drawn."
Decent to mean quantity and quality is a recent coin and entered dictionaries with Boomers circa 1960s though the usage was rare until Gen X.
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