Writing News

This week I had one of those great moments where you get to check something off of your “writing goals” list! I love taking out the purple highlighter and slowly slowly screeching it over a segment of my life that has produced the results that I had set out to achieve. Glorious.

I finished all of the exercises in the Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook and even spent a few minutes working on the next thing on my list. I finished up with chapters 31, 32, and 34 which contained the following: Chapter 31 was “Theme” and is actually one of the longest chapters since it has four different exercises. “Alternate Endings”, “The Larger Problem”, “Same Problem Other Characters”, and “Making the Antagonist’s Case.” Chapter 32 was on “Symbols” and I chose and highlighted a symbol that emerged from the story. Chapter 33 was “Brainstorming” which I had already done last year when I was working on this idea. Chapter 34 was “The Pitch” and in that I worked on a pitch for the story that was under 100 words and would work well for a query.

And now I’m done with Rough Draft #3!

Rough Draft #3 is quite a bit larger than Rough Draft #2 was back in December. It went from 73, 847 words and 270 pages all the way up to 85,292 words and 307 pages. Now I just have one more draft to do before I send it out to my first set of beta readers. And then a couple more drafts and then I’ll be done! Easy as pie….

Of course I have made pie before and either your crust is the perfect flaky texture that everyone loves to eat and is impossible to shape into something that actually resembles a dessert rather than some kind of mismatched alien spawn, or your pie looks beautiful and BettyCrockeresk but is stiff and rubbery in the culinary department…so much for the ease of pie. Argh!