I'm sorry for my prolonged absence from the blog, this summer has been full of fun stuff and a lot of changes! Because of this all my writing, not just the blog, has suffered.
Everything I do seems to happen in waves and there is very little that I do 100% of the time. It seems like I'll be in a mood for one particular thing and that will occupy me for a few weeks or months and then that ebbs away and another desire replaces it. For a while I'll be obsessed about catching up on all the hot TV shows, sometimes its a video game. Maybe I get bored easily, maybe I have so many interests and so little time I try to make time for everything. Whatever the reason, I don't seem to stick with something consistently after I start it. The good thing is after a good break I'll miss whatever I put aside and I'll pick it back up.
It seems that, for me, for now, writing has fallen into this bucket.
The only hobby I have that I seem to do more consistently than everything else is reading.
I started to feel the writing itch again about a week ago. I started to miss my characters and my world, but where I left off was slightly de-motivating to me. I started to think it over and I realized that maybe my outline was less than stellar. I have a pretty bare bones outline and I was doing a lot of the writing from the seat of my pants which made it harder for me to get down to it in my limited writing time.
I have a four page outline for my full length novel. When I wrote it up I thought that was pretty impressive, until I read an article with an author who said her outlines are usually 20 pages or so. I couldn't help but be shocked, 20 pages! Yikes!
I guess my outline wasn't nearly as good as it needs to be.
Now everyone is different, every writer writes differently but I found I was relying pretty heavily on an outline that didn't have enough information to be useful.
Ok, so how do I fix that?
Over the weekend I got an idea that would help expand my world, give more depth to my characters and help sculpt the future of my novel. A prequel short story!
Yesterday I sat down an did a story board session for my prequel and got all the big plot points for the story.
This will be my experiment. I will see if this beefier outline helps me in the short story. If it does I will go back and work up my existing outline for my novel and see if that helps.
So I'm getting back into it. Time to bring on the next wave :-)
