I must say August has been a good month. Extremely hot weather, a 2.5-week holiday spent lying in our small inflatable pool in the back yard, walking in the forest, eating out, and, of course, reading and writing.
It’s also been a month instigating some pretty big changes, but I can’t say too much about that yet.
Either way, here’s my august writing update, sharing with you what I worked on if I met the goals I set, and what my new goals will be!
What I worked on this month
My project dubbed Ice Cold is looking gooood. Seriously, I feel in a pretty good place with it now. So, I’m just going to enjoy that while it lasts, and the words keep flowing.
In any case, my goals were that I’d write 4 new scenes and another 7k words. As of now, I added 3 new scenes, and 7182 words, giving the project a total of 17182 words. So, while I’m one scene short of my goal, I still met my word count goal. How? Well, I also edited some of the previous scenes, so now there longer. Yeah. I’m one of the seemingly few people whose first rough draft is always a few words.
Somehow I end up writing the necessary point of the scene, and then after that’s written down, I fill up the scene, making sure the build-up is there and the essential details. Are there more people who write like that?
Anyway, another goal was to find 3 masterworks for Ice Cold, and I got some good candidates. Namely, I picked Nevernight, Djinn, and Circe to start with. Each have elements that I could use as inspiration, so I’m quite happy with that.
As for my progress with my other project, Half-bloods… Well, that’s a bit of a different story. So, I did in fact fill out all the character sheets, and I do feel I understand my characters better. It’s good to know what they want and what motivates them so I can have them behave more consistently throughout. I also aimed to brainstorm the first 5 signposts scenes, which I also did. But the writing… Welp, didn’t do any writing for it yet… Woopsie.
My Goals for September
Alright. Let’s come up with some new goals, shall we? I’m almost coming to a point in Ice Cold where I’m not entirely sure how I will continue, so that will be interesting. In any case, I want to add another 7k. That seems to be a good, manageable word count. In addition, I want to pick apart 1 of the masterworks to get some inspiration and ideas from it. I’ll do Nevernight first since I’ve already read that one. And then, I suppose, I might also re-evaluate the signposts I came up with for Ice Cold, since I’m a bit further along now, with a better idea of the story.
For Half-Bloods, now that I have the character sheets and the signposts scenes, I’m really finally going to write those 5 first signpost scenes. For real this time. And then, brainstorm the next 5 signpost scenes.
Summing it up
So, putting it in a list, this is what I’m gonna be doing:
- Write at least 7k words for Ice Cold
- Analyze Nevernight as my masterwork for Ice Cold
- Re-evaluate the signposts for Ice Cold
- Write or edit the 5 first signpost scenes for Half-bloods
- Brainstorm the next 5 signpost scenes for Half-bloods
We’ll see next month if I’ve succeeded!
That was it for my August writing update. Do you set goals for yourself? For your writing projects or other things? How do you go about it?
