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 (THE SHAMAN'S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC): Nothing this week. Easy one.
Refresh existing catalog: Update the four short stories and one novella in my catalog. All but one short story done. That one could use a new cover, but I haven't figured out a good one, yet.
BECOME: BROTHERS: Proceed with final edits. Make decisions about publication. Up for pre-order.
MAGE STORM: All things above considered, probably nothing this week, either. Accurate prediction.
The revising of Journey of Mystery continues. I am maybe one fourth of the way through it. It's going to be a nice long novel by the time I get done. Not super long but still nicely long.
Still writing the last chapter of the Dragonpunk steampunk thing. I am writing it just during breaks at work and therefore it is very slow. Tommy is on the back of the huge dragon, has found the dead body of its Rider, whose death he might be responsible for. And he has found the metal-crystal device that is responsible for the dragon being so big. Now he has to get it out of the dragon's body and partly heal the infection it had caused. That might take two more weeks of writing.
The Courier is at two Beta readers and hopefully they won't find much that needs fixing
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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I took a long, unannounced break on my novella a third of the way through my first draft because I got stuck. The characters' dialogue felt flat, which isn't usually a problem for me, and there just wasn't a bunch of life to the piece. I let it breathe for awhile and worked on other projects, but it's been quietly waiting for me to turn my attention back to it.
Earlier this week, I figured out the problem I was having: Because I was originally trying to write on a deadline, I rushed into the draft before I did enough world-building for the characters to each have their own unique voices. I'd been thinking of the setting as one big culture with tribal subsets, when really each tribe should be unique and there's only one time of year where they all pretend to get along. Which tribe the characters grew up in should affect each character and their relationships with the other characters they have to work with.
Essentially, the protagonists are going on a journey for reasons I'd prefer to keep secret at the moment. There's one person from each tribe, plus one extra from a specific tribe because he wouldn't let his twin sister go alone. The individual characters are already fairly unique, but exploring the differences between the tribes and the mindset each character was raised in will further cement aspects of their personalities--everything from differences in how each character might speak to the stereotypes they might have of each of the other characters on the journey before they get to know them.
I started playing with and elaborating on cultures a couple of days ago. This exploration may also end up expanding the length of this story before all is said and done, but I'm okay with that. Posts: 745 | Registered: May 2015
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