Progress Report, 4/14/08

This should be boring.

So my life is, like everybody else’s, tricky and complicated. In an attempt to get a handle on it I’ve decided to try and use this site as a tool to keep myself on-track with my goals and to do so I’m going to be issuing a series of brief reports on both my objectives and the work that I’m doing to accomplish them. Just so you know, while I am going to write these as if somebody’s going to read them I suspect they’ll be the single least interesting feature on the site…

The big main number-one goal is the completion of my first novel. Which happens to be a trilogy. Right now I’ve finished first drafts of the first two volumes and after three attempts at the third I wound up going back and looking at dangling plot points from the first two. That made it easy to do a nice thorough outline. And after I got through the first few chapters I realized that there were going to be so many changes made in the first two volumes that if I wrote the third volume now I was going to wind up pretty much rewriting it from scratch in the second draft.

Up until desperation drove me to it I resisted outlining. I wanted the story to form itself organically. I didn’t want to build the world and then put the characters and story in it – I wanted both setting and story to grow out of the characters. And that was good. I don’t think that was a mistake. But now my writer’s gut is telling me to do a thorough outline for all three volumes before getting back into the writing.

So I wrote a hundred and fifty, two hundred pages worth of notes. Then I started the outline and found myself overwhelmed by the prospect of organizing that much information. I did an outline over the past couple of weeks and after looking it over I realized that I’d held on to too much of the original structure and failed to include a lot of important stuff.

That outline is now just another section in the notes. I’ve decided to try growing an outline like an oyster grows a pearl – I’m starting off with a short clean simplistic description of the basic story and themes and then rewrite it over and over again as I add characters, details of setting, new scenes, etc. I want to make sure that the plot is solid at each stage of development and if it takes a lot of rewriting and reweaving and rethinking between stages I’ll just do the work. My instincts tell me that if I do this part of the job right everything else is going to go a lot more smoothly.

And in other areas of my life… This week I want to at least start on the design for my business card. (An artist needs an audience. If I’ve got something that I can give people that’ll put them in touch with my work it will be to my benefit. And, thanks to my wife’s son-in-law and a lot of babysitting on my part I’ll be getting them for free.)

I want to start posting links on the site.

I want to do more work on the illustrations for Swill – and as soon as I get this posted I’m going to finish the next draft of the story that’s going into the next issue. Hopefully at that point I won’t have any more non-novel writing distracting me.

I want to get all the loose papers in my studio organized – I’ve got some major renovations going on and so I’m having to clean the place up for the first time in a couple of years. It’s scary. I’d just as soon divert a river through it but it’s on the second floor.

And there should be a couple of humor posts coming up this week. One is the story of the worst puke there has ever been – I had to clean it up. The other is a public service announcement regarding MBS. MBS, or Miserable Bastard Syndrome, is my cross to bear. Actually, it’s my wife’s cross to bear. Weep for her.

Over and out,

Sean