Write Every day - Day Five

[cornerofmadness]

Stop in here with day five's accomplishments! (and you can still have me add into the day four tally too!)


Sing it Captain Picard!

Because seriously for ME the biggest detriment to me writing is me playing around on Facebook. Yeesh.



And let's continue with some wisdom from Chuck Wendig because this is really a good one. 10 quick story tips.


Day Four - Those who have written!

plaid_slytherin (yay for closing in on that finish line!)
trobadora
tinhutlady
zippitgood
navaan
auroracloud

& bay115 will be joining us!

and for those who want to tally their word counts
cornerofmadness - 175 words
fan_girlishness 370 words
kiramaru7 - 249 words

Comments

[trobadora]

Around 2,000 words, for only two different stories this time. Baby steps. *g*

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

looks like big steps to me! way to go

[kiramaru7.livejournal.com]

I wrote just 266 words today. I had hoped for more, but got a late start.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

better than I've been doing so yay. I'm about to post the character names for Tenaldi et al and I'm looking to see what people think of them.

[kiramaru7.livejournal.com]

Yeah? XD Thanks! Cool!I'll have to check that out! :D

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

now to find a damn plot...

[kiramaru7.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling. XD

Good luck! :D

[plaid-slytherin.livejournal.com]

Still chugging toward the climax. I should get there verrry soon, which will be so wonderful. I'll be really excited to be done this longfic; it's been over a year in the making.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

Trust me I know that feeling. Good luck!

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

I did some freewriting and poetry longhand, not going to even attempt a word count. *g*

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

sounds good!

[bay115.livejournal.com]

Got a portion of one scene done on one of my stories. I know what I want to happen next, deciding whether to add it to the beginning scene or transition to next scene (probably the latter).

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

excellent

[navaan]

Wrote about 2000 words, most on the WIP project that has been haunting me for a while but that now is back on my mind a lot. I'm finishing up chapter 8 to be sent to my excited beta who really wants to know what happens next and that is very exciting. I also started a ficlet and... picked up a pinch hit so, there is more writing in my future apparently. XD

I know I've been out of step with the check-ins for a while, but can I ask why we stopped doing the tallies in the overview style way we used before? I found that insanely useful and miss it very much.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

That's really great.

What exactly do you mean 'overview style?' I've started doing it to match what others asked for.

[navaan]

Never mind. I have no idea what other people asked for, but I might just have missed that.

I meant the style of tally we had going for more than a year, where every post had an easily accessible list, that had all the days and names at a glance.

Like saying ...
Day 1: names
Day 2: names
etc. with links to the previous post, so you had an overview of everyone who had checked in for all the days at a glance.

[fan-girlishness.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I never looked at that list, because I found it very hard to read - I couldn't find myself in it.

Also, people only ever updated the current day, so it was pretty useless for previous days anyway.

That's why I made the table tally, but I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea to code html tables.

I think a googledoc table would be awesome, and easy to maintain, but I only have an account under my real name so I didn't want to share that.

[trobadora]

I completely disagree with you on this. We did the one-line-per-day tally for a year and a half, and it worked great for me. It was super motivating to see my name in the tally on every day's post, and I really miss that. (I thought the table you did was a great idea at first, but it didn't end up working for me because of that.)

And people always edited things in if someone checked in late! I know I personally did, and I saw others do it as well.

[fan-girlishness.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work for you. I'd have been happy to do something that works better for you and navaan. (But you were not happy with your writing that month anyway, so you wouldn't have wanted to discuss these details, I guess.)

I updated the daily tally as well, I just left out the list under the cut (because i thought it was bulky and a lot less easy to look at than the table tally).

I had the table tally as a sticky post on my journal, so I thought that would work, but apparently not. :(

I think the main difference is that I never read my flist daily, so I don't check in using my flist. It only occurs to me now that the tally as you did it would work better for that.

[navaan]

I think the main difference is that I never read my flist daily, so I don't check in using my flist. It only occurs to me now that the tally as you did it would work better for that.

See, it would never occur to me to check LJ and not use my flist for it and this is how we started the challenge so I got kind of used to doing it that way. ;)

That said, the table format was okay for me and I managed to check in during your month, despite missing and being late a couple of times. It would probably have been a little better for me if the table hadn't been another click away, but I only realize that now.

[navaan]

Well, obviously we disagree about that. I felt it worked well for us for months, which is why I wondered if I had missed a discussion about changing it.

[fan-girlishness.livejournal.com]

I changed some of it in the month I did it, because it worked better for me. But if that wasn't good for you, I would have appreciated a heads-up. I know you have been participating a lot longer than I have.

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

As far as I know it's just kind of happened that it's been different for more months in a row. zippitgood seemed to have problems with her timetable and so the tally kind of didn't happen. cornerofmadness is new to this and I realise now that when she asked what she needs to do as a host and I was the first to reply, it probably wasn't super-helpful that all I said about the tally was "keep a tally of who's written". Sorry about that, seems these days I'm lucky if I can coherently explain anything more complex than my own name. :-P

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I am definitely new to this

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

Ah okay yeah I get you. That I can do. Thanks

[navaan]

Thank you! All the tallies from before are here, if you want to look at the format. Write Every Day - Overview

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks

[fan-girlishness.livejournal.com]

Day 5: 150 words

I don't write from an outline or anything (because I hate knowing how the story will end), but I write a character arc sheet to keep track of the emotional turning points for each character over the course of the story.

As usual (this has happened at least three times in this story now), I only remember to consider the emotional impact of a scene once it won't flow. It's always the same: I just write something (anything) and when words won't come, I realize it's because the scene is useless and boring.

At least I now know to recognize the pattern, so now that I was stuck on that scene for three days, I went and updated my character arc sheet.

That was immensely helpful, and even though my story only got 150 words longer, my character arc sheet got longer by at least that. :D

Also: I came up with an excellent last sentence for my story. Just like that, completely painless, yay!


p.s.: pssst your post wont display correctly, there is a typo in one of the username tags.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

yeah I'm not an outliner either but the character arc sheets sound interesting. It sounds like a useful tool.


Thanks, that's what you get when you add in someone at 1 AM. I have it fixed now.