6-AM Editing Challenge - Wednesday, Week 1

What's the 6-AM Editing Challenge? You can read the backstory here, but in a nutshell, it's me getting up at 6-AM every morning and writing, in an attempt to finish edits on my novel, MIRRORPASS, by this summer. Read about my novel on the WIP page.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30

GOALS: Continue writing the merger scene in chapter 18. This is mostly discussion, and I want to move past the "everyone starts talking" part to the nitty gritty, "here's where we go from here part," which is what will clarify how the story is moving forward and what plot actions need to be taken to reach the climax. It's been hard to write, and I need to hash it all out.

LIMITATIONS: Had an assignment due this morning, so before I could begin writing, I had to finish that. And I had to leave for school at 9.

UP AT-- 6:30

STARTED WRITING -- 8:36 (yikes!)

[was too busy to write notes. Normally I need some warmup time...but not today! Imagine crazy typing here]

STOPPED WRITING: 9:17 (double yikes!)

PROGRESS:

I wrote 450 words again--except this time I did it in half an hour.made good progress into the scene. I'm pretty impressed. However, I still haven't managed to get up at 6 once this challenge. So now that I'm getting into the swing of things, tomorrow's goal is: get up at six!

Also, late yesterday after doing my blog post where I talked about ideas for cutting a secondary-POV scene, I actually went ahead and did that. So that's 250 more words cut. I still need to find the best location for the second scene, but I've moved it for now.

AT THE END OF THE DAY:

Well, okay, the writing day went fast. Yet writing consistently and having a schedule is having a big effect, I think, especially since I'm not waffling about whether I'll write or not--I've already decided. The commitment is helping kill procrastination.

The other cool thing is how my brainstorming has gained focus. I tend to brainstorm about my novels a lot, something I attribute to long commutes, but since I don't normally have much time to write, I think about the same scene over and over. Now I've found myself being able to brainstorm about solutions to other problems in the novel.

With that in mind, I have another edit goal to add to my list: there's a discussion in chapter 3 that has important implications for the story, but one beta commented that it resolves too abruptly. I've been thinking about this since her comments and I think she's right. After some brainstorming today, I realized that I could put the resolution at a different time, say a few days later. Much of the discussion will stay as is but I'll need to rewrite the intro to that scene and make sure the mood shift is consistent.

That's another goal, but for tomorrow, I still want to focus on this Chapter 18 merger scene.

Truly and always,

-Creative A