The Times They Are A Changing

Hello again! It’s been a while since I’ve posted. The major reason is that my mother has been in the hospital (She’s being released on the day I write this). What that’s meant is that I have had almost no time for writing. That will probably continue for the near future. I realized that if I want to keep writing (and I do), I need to change how I write and I think I’ve come up with an approach that works

The Good Ole Days

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a programmer in my day job. I’m used to dealing with manipulating large sections of text. That’s why I’ve had no issue writing in Microsoft Word. I would open up the Word Document and just pick up where I left off. If you had to rearrange paragraphs, it wasn’t great, but I could make it happen. And it supported the way I write. In the writing world, writes tend to fall into two camps. Plotters outline and plan each chapter and scene in detail before writing. “Pantsers” write by the seat of their pants; they just dive in and see where the story goes. I have been much more of a “pantser“. I have the overall story plotted out at a high level, but most of the details and how to get there are made up as I go. This means I really need more continuous time to write because I have to make those decisions while I’m writing. And it’s worked well for me until now.

Changes

A couple of months ago, I decided to buy a program called Scrivener by Literature and Latte (what an awesome name for a software company). The product is made to help you organize and produce documents. You may ask, “What’s big deal? Word can do that.” And the answer to that is “Yes, it can.” But Scrivener can do some much more. You can keep notes about characters, setting, or any research you need within your project. If you break your writing down into smaller units such as chapters or even scenes, you can move them around and rearrange them to your heart’s content. And when I, you click a menu item to turn this back into a Word document or even into a digital book.

Since I realized that I am mostly going to have short blocks of time to write, I decided to plot out my short stories in more detail. I took each story (except the previously completed story) and broke each of them down into the scenes I needed for the story. I think that’s going to help me in two ways. First, I think I’m an impatient writer. I know, how can I say that when I’ve been working on The Reluctant Agent for three years? What I mean is that I really want to get the plot out. I think that means I tend to want to race right to the plot (especially in short stories) and I sometimes skimp on things like characters and description. Plotting out the scenes helps get that out of the way and I’ve scratched that itch. Second, I now have a roadmap for getting work done. Since I’m likely to have much smaller units of time, I can work on a scene where I know what’s got to happen and I can make small incremental progress.

Here’s a screenshot of my current horror story anthology project;

I don’t know if this will work, but I’m giving this experiment a try.  I have mixed feelings about my potential success. As a writer, I’ve been lucky that I’ve always been able to outline in my head. Doing all of those outline exercises in English class felt so tedious for me because I just did it in my head; why did I have to write it out?. On the other hand, Scrivener feels in some way like the Visual Studio of Writing. I use Visual Studio for programming. In modern programming design, you break things down into very small units that have certain properties and can do certain things. To write an application, you have to tie all of these units together to make the program do what you want. I can’t help but think that Scrivener is just like that. So maybe this experiment will work after all.

In Other News

 You may have noticed that I just made The Reluctant Captain available on Kobo, another e-book distributor. I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of driving lately (approaching 200 miles a day), so I’ve been listening to podcasts to past the time. I’ve recently started listening to The Creative Penn which focuses on the business side of being an author. It’s an excellent podcast and I’ve learned so many things. One of which was that I really should make my book available via Kobo, especially since all of the work to create the e-book was already done. I took about thirty minutes, set up the Kobo account, and uploaded my book. The very next day, I had a new sale. So, yeah!

In a few weeks, I’m taking a mini writing retreat. I’ve reserved a cabin for two nights and I’m hoping to get a bunch of work done on these horror stories. We’ll see if this experiment helps. If it does, I intend to use this approach with my next novel. 

That’s all for now. I plan to do a post after the writing retreat to report how that went and if my experiment is really helpful.

Happy journeys!

Mike

I think because it’s Fall, I’m thinking of all things macabre. While the editing work begins on The Reluctant Agent, I thought I’d take the time to write some horror short stories. I’ve previously had written one story and was expired to write another one after our vacation this summer. So I decided to pull to

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