November 10th, 2021 – 1,141

Let’s focus on writing, that’ll draw a nice line under yesterday and make for a happy glowing post right? Well, guess what, I think HOR is turning into a slow-motion trainwreck. So that’s fun. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I think it’s got a little something to do with the fact that I am not used to trying to put all the sensory detail into the first draft, and as a result, I keep rabbit holing and getting lost. I finish a 4k word chapter and I’m not even sure it needs to be in the story or anything of note happens in it. This is not a happy feeling when it represents like, half a week’s work.

My old adage of ‘get it in the rewrite’ still holds true, but you do have to try not to make it so future you has to write the entire novel again from scratch. I’m not above doing that: I’ve done it for several books in the series, and I did it twice for both TSS and WHT. But that is time-consuming, and while I am allowed to write bad words for target, I should at least try not no. At least my character sheet tracker has made writing earlier a lot easier than it used to be now. Need to channel more of that energy I have afterwards into rewrites, maybe even more rewriting of words I just wrote.

What I really need is a better writing suite. Google Docs is fantastic, and while yes I keep separate backups of all my stories I would not trade that security for anything less than a perfect tool. That said, Docs in itself, is not a perfect tool. I can’t highlight a word and see it’s word x/y for this chapter or x/z for the whole story. I can’t remember if Scrivener does that, but Scrivener is far from a perfect tool, downright clunky last time I used it in fact. Maybe it’s time to do another hunt of what other software is out there. Or I could you know just, get good. That’s an option too. I hope.