Halo: Planning Evolved

[alexandraerin]

Okay, so I'm about midway through writing the next chapter of Tales of MU. And when I paused for reflection on how to improve and continue it, I realized I really want to expand the beginning part with Ian more. Give him a proper introduction in the volume, give new readers a proper introduction to the sexual and sensual aspects of the story, etc. And I realized that will give a chapter that splits pretty evenly into two segments: Ian, and Amaranth. And I thought, "Well, that's good." Each of Mackenzie's lovers introduced in turn.

But then I thought how weird it's going to be to have a chapter segmented like that, and I thought that with my current plans to have all largish chapters (5,000 words = 20 pages) is going to result in a lot of segmentation.

And then I thought, "If I split it into two chapters, then I'm already looking at 'bloat' to the timeline I wanted to follow for book 1." But my concern there is not about how many chapters it takes to get somewhere... a "chapter" is not a concrete unit of story, time, or space. It's about how much real world time.

But my next thought that followed on the heels of that one was, "But if I already have Monday's chapter done-ish because it's branched off from this one, I can do a chapter on Wednesday and Friday next week and be right back where I was."

And then the lightbulb came on.

I settled on two updates a week because trying to do more consistently introduced too many chances to fail. It's not a matter of volume of words produced. My three-updates-a-week periods generally had around 9,000 words. When I was doing 5 updates a week, the chapters were shorter... maybe around 2,000 words, so 10,000 words total. Two updates of between 4 and 6 thousand words? Right in line with everything else.

The key factor is that it's easier for me to make sure I have two days I can sit and do serious writing in than it is to make sure I have three days or five days.

So here's what I'm thinking now. I'm going to go ahead and write what I'd planned on writing for Friday. But I'm going to post half of it (about 3,000 words... my good ol' standby.) And the other half is going to go up on Monday. Monday I'm going to write another 5 to 6 thousand words. That's Wednesday and Friday's chapter. Some other day next week... Wednesday or Thursday... I'll write another 5 to 6 thousand words. That's next Monday and Wednesday.

If I have an off day? If I have 3,000 word day or even a no thousand word day? Meh. First of all, I only need to be able to muster one and a half heavy writing days per day to keep up with the demand... writing MU heavily two days a week will give me a buffer. I don't expect the buffer to last long because Stuff Happens, but it will be a regenerating buffer. When I've tried building a buffer before it was based on the idea of things like writing four days a week and posting three. It's way too easy to stumble there, and having a break between days when I'm writing MU really helps.

Within a day, the momentum of just working on MU is very helpful. But from day to day, I need to be able to turn my mind towards other things, and to let my mind wander over possibilities without immediately having to write them down.

So, anyway... the chapter breakdowns I talked about for the first book of MU will not work out exactly the way I said. There will be a minimum of three chapters to cover the weekend (possibly four... slightly shorter chapters allows for more gradation of time, which seems to me to be a good thing) instead of two. But in terms of how fast in real time the story moves along and how much space is allotted to various things, I'll be more or less in the same neighborhood.

And while I'm finding that spending a whole day writing on one subject/project works best, this plan is flexible enough that if I have a week that's busy with other things I can spend a few hours each day writing so I don't lose my whole buffer.

This might seem premature but I'm not going to announce a Wednesday update until it's Monday and I have the chapters for the rest of the week done. If that happens... if I have a writing day on next Monday like I've had this Monday and like I'm having today, then I think I'm really on the right track in terms of what I've been doing differently.

That's enough talking about it. Time to get back to writing.

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[carsonfiles.livejournal.com]

"Comment hither or thither. Void where yon." It's the little things that make me grin. Reading this was the best thing to happen to me today. Seriously.