2012 Project Post 05

Since my last post, I have put Stellar Gift of Death aside to concentrate on Forget the Sun’s beat sheet. I finally finished it today and have a few observations.

1. The stopwatch is essential to my writing at the paying job. For years, I have beat myself up for not getting enough writing done, no matter how I decided to track it. This year I decided to use time and not worry about my word count. Well then, it became beat myself up for not putting in the time with the timer when I got home for a lousy excuse. Yes, there is a part of my brain that thinks exhaustion is an excuse I’m using to procrastinate. But I have finally found the stopwatch method shuts that damn part up. It’s so simple, click on the stopwatch while writing story and stop the stopwatch if you have to switch tasks. Before I go home, I see what I have done in bursts throughout the day and mark it off of my daily to do list. I even found an online stopwatch so now I don’t have to remember to always pack the only working one I have now. Consistently, I get an least an hour done every day unless I don’t open up the files at all, and this was undoubtedly the case when I would berate myself for not being able to continue once I got home. I don’t mind working over if I have the energy, but now I can tell that part “today is done, let’s go to bed.”
2. I keep mistaking what events are the plot points on my beat sheets. This one throws me for a loop, because I can get it right in fanfiction (Tin Man: Prince of the Outer Zone snapped together so quick) but have made the same mistake twice in original stories. Stellar Gift of Death before the rewrite had the first plot point pushed back to the midpoint and my first take on Forget the Sun had the midpoint hiding as the lull before the second plot point. I stopped on the beat sheet when I realized that I was in part four but had too much ground to cover before getting that close to the climax of the story. I had to point out to myself that I had more scenes than what the blank form has marked off. Shoving scenes into the appropriate parts was easier to do and bam, I’m finished.
3. A map of the setting makes all the difference. The City has a name and an amorphous history and I still need to layout the streets, but I was inspired to use Stan Hywet Hall as the model for Peg’s ancestral home. I basically did it because I suck at designing mansions, but it turns out that a big piece of the climax was decided by an architectural feature of the house. The other locations will probably do the same thing, once I figure them out.

91 beats from 144 scenes; I’m envisioning the beats as scenes right now, but when I actually write them they might condense more. The cast of characters shifted around a lot too. When I finished the read-through, I thought Peg’s maternal grandparents would have a bigger role along with David’s police officer coworkers. Instead, they vanished to the background like extras and new secondary characters surged in their place. The romance triangle has similarly disappeared, but it may turn up again as the characters fully engage with each other.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow I need to check back in with Stellar and see if anything has jarred loose. And if it hasn’t, I can finalize the cast list for Forget the Sun and make it pretty.