the fruits of lazy labor
Two days ago I finished the zero draft of a novel. It's about 53K and I wrote it in about six months by sticking to the 300 words a day thing. It's a trash heap of word chaos, and "finishing" it was akin to crashing a plane into the ground, but I'm still kind of floored that stringing small amounts of words on a page and forcing myself to write through a void of a middle actually gets things done. (Not a clean method mind you, I wrote 4 versions of chapter 11 until one stuck, but it still worked, albeit kind of arduously.)
After I finished the draft I panicked a bit, cause like, I didn't want to break the streak (289 days and counting) but I don't have another thing ready enough I can dive right into. So I've decided to draft a rough story outline for what I want to do next. It's a standalone fantasy/romance type thing, but there's a huge hole in the middle of it and I'm afraid to start it without knowing what needs to be there (I so suck at middles) so now my 300 a day is just writing what happens in the story. Kind of like a very robust outline. Lore, backstory, lead up, whatever informs the story and where it needs to go is going on the page. It's even looser writing than before which makes getting the words down much easier. But I feel like this will really give me a fighting chance to get through the next book.
So now, the real meat of my mental efforts is now being turned towards editing the prequel novella that I wrote in the middle of writing the novel. Three pages a day of editing is my quota. Again, not too big, not too small. I'm all about the tiny, tangible goals. Not gonna question a method that seems to be working. Also, I fucking love editing. I always forget that until I'm in it again.
