Writing Progress Review #5

Content warning: occasional profanity. You can tell these sessions are largely unscripted because we start off this week's check-in with a brief discussion of sports, specifically the NFL and Formula 1. If that's not your thing, skip ahead three minutes. A the minutes, @MichaelPinkus-Author reports on his progress over the past two weeks. His word count: 5,455. then we digress into how many characters we have and how we track them. At 5:20 we get to my update, a resounding (for me) 1,888 words, a new record! [yet still well below where I need to be.] At six minutes that segues into the glitch I had to deal with, discovering I'd used a single character for two distinct, incompatible purposes. By 6:50, this has morphed into a discussion of killing off characters, and by 8:40 we're off to how people get killed off, particularly in movies and TV. Around 11 minutes, I'm on about how I spent three days updating my NovelWriterExtract tool to pull characters and locations into my generated spreadsheets so I could keep track and not have one person doing two things at the same time. This leads into the genesis of adding scene metadata to novelWriter: story structure methods like The Story Grid (and many others). We compare my software/spreadsheet approach with his half-pad of paper with regular re-writes. At 16:10 we momentarily get back on track and do some more reporting on our writing progress. Imagine that. Then we're off on the difficulty of naming our characters. By 22:00 we're working on setting goals for our next two weeks, and how Michael's attempt to get 80K words done in a shadow-of-the-former-NaNoWriMo November, and how he got to the point where he needed 7,500+ words per day to hit that target. The upshot of that is we now both have a goal of hitting a complete first draft, in the range of 80K words each, by the end of the year. There's nothing like being in sync! This means I also have to seriously pick up my pace, right as we come into the holiday social season. This makes my goal—well, let's call it ambitious. At 29 minutes we talk about how we each select (or build) the tools we use to support our work, and then a discussion of what a first draft means for each of us, which is vastly different. Just before we sign off, Michael poses a question for me to ponder for our next session.