First draft of the year

I've started writing my first story of the year. This is a story that I started last year and stopped when I got stuck. Now I've come back to it, but I've had to make some hard choices to make it work.

This is the tricky part about rewriting a broken story. You really have to let everything be on the chopping block. Even things you love or things that you always thought were going to be in the story. To make it work, everything has to be able to be changed.

And I have changed just about everything. I kept my magic system, my hero and a couple locations, that's about it. Just about everything else had to change in one way or another. Now I'm hoping that those changes will make everything flow better.

I say "hoping" because I'm doing some twisted version of pantsing and plotting at the same time. The beginning is a bit fuzzy (though it's getting better because that's what I'm working on writing right now), some stuff in the middle is plotted out, as is the very end, but there's a huge gap towards the end where I have no idea what is going to happen. Hopefully it will come to me as I get to it.

And speaking of getting to it, I've decided to try a new plan for my writing time. I just finished listening to an RWA Conference lecture called "Fast Draft" (Candace Havens was the speaker). The idea is to do 20 pages a day for two weeks and you'll have a rough first draft. I do like the idea, but I've found using page numbers or word count as goals intimidates me and I freeze up and get nothing done.

So my plan is to do two solid hours of writing every day. One in the morning and one in the evening, or both in the morning, I don't care. I will get those hours in. No excuses. No whining.

Before I gave myself three months to finish this manuscript, but hopefully with this new plan I can fly through this draft and get it done a lot faster... Hopefully.

I'll be posting hours/word counts on Twitter and do a weekly update here (if I remember :-P).

As of today I have 5,119 words.