Novel Weekly Update #2 – A Calmer Space
It’s been an eventful week. I’ve managed to mostly keep my writing schedule on track with a few hiccups, but I also began taking the organization of my project more seriously. First, I looked into a word processor I liked more than Microsoft Word or Google Docs. I settled, for now, on Dabble, because it’s got a pretty minimalist interface that’s easy on the eyes, and has good built in sidebar features, word count, etc. It’s less optimized for formatting manually, but seems to be able to handle what it doesn’t allow me to do on its own, more often than not, and frankly that probably lets me focus more on the writing itself. It also has a pleasant dark theme. I’m a little iffy on continuing with the subscription after my free trial is over, but I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in a product with that kind of payment plan. [This is not sponsored.]
As for the novel itself, I’ve begun experimenting with longer chapters containing multiple scenes, and taking more time to describe the environment around my characters. I still need to work on my pacing, and my dialogue, more than anything I think, but so far I’m really proud of where the novels’ taking me. I’m learning a lot from the project a lot more quickly than I expected to, which I suppose underlines how little I know what I’m getting myself into. My roommate and I have gotten into a semi-regular routine of going to some of the local cafes to get our various work done for the day, and it’s been a relatively relaxed environment in which to get my writing done.
I spent the majority of this week working on a single chapter, chapter four, which has turned out to be much longer than the other chapters I’ve written so far (but, in my personal opinion, much more effective at delivering the plot given its use of multiple scenes.) I’m still hesitant to use more than a few characters at once, I think.
I’ve worked on character biographies for each of the novels’ major characters and some notes to keep track of the minor ones in my new environment, and today I’ll be attempting to move more of the specific outlines and worldbuilding notes as well. Overall I think this will leave them much more likely to be useful to me in the future. For the most part so far, the notes and outlines I respectively took and made mostly just served as one-off exercises in revision rather than any useful reference.
Overall, things are starting to look okay again after last weeks hiccups, although it seems I have to take things a bit more slowly if I want to keep them relatively consistent. If I can settle into a nice rhythm, the rest should be easy.
Or as easy as it can be, at least…