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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Waiting Out Insomnia


The last blog written in Minnesota: While I was home and dealing with insomnia, I spent time playing with story stuff. I did a synopsis for the Work in Progress (WIP). Summing up a book I haven't written yet is a special kind of hell all the time, but for this particular story it was worse than usual. I think I finally put together something decent. I hope.


I also played around with other things. I created a spreadsheet with formulas to add up word count as I recorded each scene. I'm not sure I'll actually remember to use this, but it might be a helpful tool. When I see progress, it encourages me to keep going while I'm writing and get back to writing when I get home from work or am on lunch or something.


I bought a couple of books on plotting. People who know me just fell out of their chairs. It's not that I don't plan things or know generally where the story is going, but I'm hoping to have less false starts. If I ever added up all the scenes I've trashed, I probably have enough word count for like ten more books. I thought if I had better focus, I could produce stories faster.


To shock those who know me further, I read both books. Some of what I read are things I don't think I'll be able to do—like the 3x5 index cards. I had a bad experience with a how to be a writer book and index cards.

Then I played around with PowerPoint. I created slide shows for each of my series using pictures of the characters. Yes, this is a total time waster, but the cruel thing about insomnia is that even though I can't sleep, I am tired enough that writing is impossible. I'm hoping to create a Book of Knowledge for the series I'm writing using PowerPoint slides. I can fill in highlights about characters and storylines and facts about the world and have them all in one place.

And yeah, I'm trying to pretend that I really wasn't wasting hours of time.
I really wish I could have written while I was home. When I left Atlanta, I only had two more scenes to go to have the proposal pages done. I even lugged my writing laptop to MN along with my everyday laptop because I was sure I could finish the project during my downtime. It just didn't happen. I worked so hard on the house, that I was mentally exhausted every night even before the insomnia kicked into high gear.

I'm still calling my time a writing win, though, because I have a synopsis for the WIP. Maybe it will need some tweaking, but I think it's close to ready to go, and hopefully, by the time you're reading this, I've finished the two scenes. ::fingers crossed::