#trtn

I have incredibly poor time management skills when it comes to anything I'm not being paid to do. Essentially, what I want to do today is lay out a two-month plan for the About a Lizard series and squeeze into the following twelve months time for other fiction endeavors which include two original stories, a fanwork in the Aliens versus Predator universe, and a crossover with I'mRobin on AO3.

Normally, I post vague updates on the progress of the next chapter in the top notes of my submissions on AO3, I haven't been doing that because lately, my head is in ten different places at once.

The plan for AAL is to take all of the notes and information about loosely planned chapters for the current installment of the story (We can call it book two) and break down those chapters further by summarizing individual scenes within them. I already do this but I only do it one chapter at a time as I work, and then I tend to abandon a fully summarized chapter for weeks on end while I putter around procrastinating.

When I write these summaries, they generally contain a list of concepts that need to be addressed at a precise point in time along with character actions and an idea of the content of dialog between the characters. For an example of what this actually looks like in a summary: “Dune needs to lament about the potatoes she was trying to grow and how more than a month without steady watering has probably killed the spuds. Maybe have her dig around in the pots (old tires) to check for survivors.”  

It's basic stuff and the above line of quoted text is the substance of an entire small scene. Many of these summaries are much longer but even these tiny ones are incredibly helpful. They help to keep me on track with where I want a chapter to go, what I want it to cover, and it helps me to enforce self-control in keeping from wandering off in my head and indulging in unnecessary info-dumpery. Once this small scene is finished, I know exactly where I need to shift my attention because I already have that information at my disposal in the next summarized scene.

Knowing where you're going helps more than you think. I know the trajectory of the story as a whole, but getting from point A to point B within individual chapters is easier said than done. As an example: If you're writing a story about a girl named Jane who finds a magical singing rock in the woods, but you need her to travel across a country to find a wizard to explain the significance of the singing rock, then you need to have something happen during that journey. If this journey is to be concise enough to fit into a single chapter, you'll need minor conflict and resolution within that chapter, and it can be as extreme or subtle as you want, but it still has to exist and that requires thought and planning. Alternatively, you can take that cross-country trip that Jane goes on and turn it into the flesh of an entire story, where the journey itself is the story, not so much whatever is going on with the singing rock. I'm trying to avoid letting the minor plot interfere with the primary plot. Using Jane and the Rock as a euphemism for minor plot sequences: I want these “trips to find the wizard” to be consistently contained within one chapter without becoming arcs of their own which would interfere with the primary plot.

Phew! Now that you know what I mean by summarized chapters and scenes, and have probably realized that I am completely out of my mind, I can get to the point of this. I'd like to summarize scenes for all thirty-three planned chapters of “The Road to Nowhere” as soon as possible. Why would I want to do all of this work when I could simply be flat out writing? Because if I do this and get the bulk of the planning out of the way, I will ultimately be producing chapters at a far faster clip. If every chapter consists of between seven and ten scenes and I can flesh out one scene per day, that means I could publish one chapter approximately every ten days versus one chapter every month or several months. This better executed organization process would see the fic finished in a little under a year. I don't want to do the math and find out what that time-frame looks like if I continue on at my current pace. It probably looks something like six years, UGH!

Organization matters and at the moment, I don't have it. I can probably summarize the whole dang fic scene-by-scene within a couple weeks if I really apply myself to it. I may get only small way into this process before I say “Screw this!” and continue work chapter by chapter as a good little fic pigeon, but even if I only plan out three or four chapters at a time, I'm still coming out way ahead of the game. That's important to me. So, that is what is going on with the About a Lizard thingy. The following is a bullet point of dates and plans for November - December regarding About a Lizard and other projects

The next piece of writing I'm likely to crank out is an update chapter for the crossover titled Unlikely which I am working on with ImRobin over on AO3. I would like to publish this by the 15th of November at the very latest but I’ll probably be able to manage it far earlier. It is incredibly well structured because two people are working closely to hack out dialog and actions for each character to prevent out of character sequences and to give both parties as much creative control as possible in each chapter. It should not take long if I can sit for a few hours without interruption to work on it.

Chapter 4 of The Road To Nowhere is already started and I'm slowly scratching out the first draft scene by scene when I feel like writing. That will probably pop up on AO3 shortly after my half of the update on Unlikely, so expect it by the 17th at the very latest.

Once chapter 4 of The Road to Nowhere pops up on AO3, I will be summarizing and planning the rest of the chapters as much as I can with the goal to plan all scenes for all thirty-three (or more) chapters by mid-December. Once this is done, I'll be able to focus effort in a more meaningful way and lay the foundation for a routine where I flesh out one scene per day and hopefully begin submitting a chapter every ten to fifteen days instead of every month or two.

Chapter 5 of The Road to Nowhere should appear by the end of December.

If I can get this rhythm to work, I may take periodic breaks every five chapters to do work on a few original short stories I've had in my head for years but not enough organizational skill or confidence to execute. These may turn up on AO3 as well.

In short, to my best knowledge, updates will appear in the following order. Keep in mind personal schedules prevent me from knowing exact dates when future Unlikely chapters will get written.

11/13/18 – 11/15/18: Unlikely will update

11/16/18 – 11/17/18: The Road to Nowhere will update

11/17/18 – 12/15/18: I will be working solely on summarizing scenes for TRTN & Unlikely

12/25/18 – 12/30/18: The Road to Nowhere will resume with the submission of chapter 5