Hi! I’m back again! This week has been very productive so I’m excited to share with all of you what I have been up to!
Update on my current WIP
I finished going through the quasi-first draft of my WIP (which still needs a name, if you couldn’t tell). As I mentioned previously, I cut up the novel into five documents to have a better overview and to make it easier to organize the story. Now that I was somewhat happy with how the story and plot was sorted out, I allowed myself to merge all the documents into one.
And I don’t know if any of you have done this before, but it was scary to say the least to cut 15,000 words from a document and then paste them into another. I made sure to do the maths and check that the word count updated correctly on the new document, hoping Word wasn’t going to do something weird and delete passages for some reason. But from the looks of it, it all went find, and I ended up with a manuscript of a whooping 124,264 words, a.k.a 334 pages. For those unfamiliar with A4 to book page ratio, that’s about 668 book pages. That is more pages than Crooked Kingdom has (the most recent book I’m proud to say I have read). And I am more than happy to state that all of it is just raw enemies-to-lovers slow burn and that I, dear reader, am the author of this masterpiece. (Can anyone tell I've been watching Bridgerton? ??) Of course, before I get ahead of myself, I should probably remind myself that this is a first draft. As a matter of fact, I doubt I can even call it that! It’s much, much rougher than a first draft, and it goes without saying that no one would be able to read it as a normal manuscript at all at this stage: there are scenes missing, cuts that are abrupt, and honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are a handful, if not a mountain’s worth, of passages that end mid-sentence! Not to mention, there are characters that just appear halfway through or towards the end of the novel, who are supposed to be part of the story from the beginning, but only pop up later since I only came up with them later in the revision. Don't even get me started on the potential inaccuracies and logical problems in regards to character development. As I head into a second revision to hopefully be able to call the manuscript a first draft, I’ll be working on fleshing out the characters and the world background. I set up a character document listing all of the characters mentioned to be able to keep track of their physical description and relation to other characters, and, later, to keep track of wounds and scars. Because my goodness do those appear and disappear as though by magic sometimes! It’s crazy how easy it is to forget stuff like that when writing! Connecting with other writers
As a goal for the week, I also wanted to join a new writing discord server. I really enjoy using those to get to know other writers and of course to use the sprinting bot which makes writing so much more intense (and fun, I should add).
I found a group with over a hundred members and joined without hesitation. When it’s such a big group, you’re sure to always find at least one other person online. I guess that’s also kind of the downside, as I get to wake up every morning to over ten discord notifications, mainly because I live in Europe and a lot of the members are from the US. Half of that is on me of course, mainly because I haven’t gotten around to turning the notifications off yet, haha. Anyway, I already got to talk to some people which was really nice, and I’m looking forward to using the platform to share ideas, and have discussions about writing. I also talked about the sprinting bot, which I use a lot. If you don’t know, sprinto is a bot on discord which basically allows you to set up a writing sprint. In the writing community, writing sprints are generally well known. The concept is pretty straightforward: you agree on a time limit, say for example 10 minutes, and then you try to write as many words as you can. So yeah, it's basically a literal sprint, but instead of your whole body running, it’s only your fingers running over the keyboard. Sprints are all the more intense and stress inducing (in a good way), when others are competing too. In any case, it’s a helpful tool to sit down and write, even if, at the end of the day, it may just turn out to be garbage and you delete half of it. Sometimes it’s just what you need to get out of a writing slump, which is why I enjoy them so much. Definitely not because I’m super competitive and want to win every single sprint I join. Of course, sprinting isn’t for everyone. I know there are some people who literally tense up from the stress and get writer's block because of it. So yeah, it really depends, but in any case, it's definitely worth a shot! TL;DR
So yeah, that’s it for this week's update! You can find a short video version of my week here:
Self-promo, yeet
What is a blog post without some self-promotion? I mean, technically I promoted my tik tok account just above, but still, now it's time for my youtube channel to shine. Why, of course I am an influencer! I'm definitely down with the kids!
Besides, I uploaded the video this week so technically it was part of my week, and, as such, has its place in the weekly update. For any Star Wars fans out there, the video may very well be of interest to you, as in it, I recite the whole script of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith blindfolded. Yes, you read that right. If it sounds like something you’d enjoy, here it is:
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