A Confession

Due to my twice-weekly Rain updates, my revision and submission of Teahouse and my full course load at school this semester, I have done little to no work on Ghostbox. There, I admit it.

I’d been planning, most of the summer, to outline the plot on notecards, keep a small notebook nearby for ideas and generally have my thoughts together by the time NaNo rolled around. Last year I worked off of the Ten Key Scenes notecard plotting plan (found in James Smith’s book The Writer’s Little Helper), and this year I’d been hoping to expand that setup to include non-critical scenes to set tone, establish character back story and slip in a little foreshadowing here and there.

I’ve done none of that.

With the exception of the notes I took on the day I went to photograph some dying malls in the area (which didn’t go as well as planned - I didn’t have a decent camera at the time and one of the malls turned out to be thriving), I haven’t done any plotting. I’ve got three or so characters, two settings and some general notes, but nothing I can start the story out with.

I’ve got four days to rectify this, on top of reading, doing classwork and posting reviews and interviews on the book blog.

My first year, I worked off of a very scant idea, and it worked somewhat well - until I got to the 50k word mark, NaNo ended, and I found myself with the first half of a very bizarre story. I never went back to finish it, and I’m hoping this year to be able to do a 75k - 100k full manuscript by the time I’m done, whether it’s in November or December. I need to be able to do this while also juggling an Internet serial novel, short fiction submissions and whatever else I need to compose for my grades.

I need to either cut back on sleep or find a better way to manage my time.