Young Writers Society

It's reaching crunch time at University again. I've gotta write the first draft of a 3,000 word story, and prepare a ten minute presentation on it, before Friday. Thing is, I still don't even know what the story is going to be about, beyond a few vague ideas...

I've also gotta read like 15+ chapters of Moby Dick a day, which is just freakin' evil, so that I can start work on an essay about it.

Still, once Wednesday has passed, I should be able to continue work on The Broken again. =)

Ah, well university is over for me, for the year, ha. So I have plenty of time to harass you.

That short story is nothing, can be done in one afternoon. (If I were you and I what I do in such instances, when I'm running out of time or just plain lazy, I recycle old stories.) So grab any old thing you did, or even submitted to another class, heh, and hand it in! Voila and you're done. I don't envy you over the Moby Dick thing though, haha, that thing is huge.

Luck.

Are you by any chance doing a degree on One Million and One Ways to Go Mad?

Seriously, I'm putting off reading Moby Dick until I have to

I think we're being a tad unfair on Moby Dick - let us not forget, it is probably one of the most hilariously titled books ever. And we immature folk should be grateful.

On another note, I remember reading it waaay back before I had any sensible reason to be doing so and, also, loving it. So, it can't be that bad.

:p

Entry Four
-- ZOMFG, updatez?

Well, it’s been a while since the last entry. Almost four months to be not-so-exact. It’s kind of depressing that in all that time I’ve written so little.

So, a few things I wanted to update y’all about, but didn’t get around to:

1) I reached 10,000 words - a nice round milestone,

2) I passed 16,500 words - making this incarnation of the novel my longest story evah,

3) I reached 20,000 words - another nice round milestone,

4) I’ve finished the Traitor Colonel story arc - in total weighing in at just under 22,500 words.

My writing has been disappointingly sporadic, though. There’s a few odd days where I do really well and write loads, but for everyone one of those there is a couple of consecutive week of no writing at all. Don’t think I wrote anything at all during February, now I think about it, for example.

Still! I’m getting there, if slowly. I want to try to step up my game a bit. If I can do at least 500 words a day - each and every day - I’ll be beyond happy. Let’s hope I can do it.

Although, now I’ve finished the Traitor Colonel arc, I’ve run out of plan. I have most of the novel planned out roughly, but only had TC planned in any sort of detail. Which means I’ve gotta start working on the new arc’s plan before I can carry on with the novel's first draft.

Next story arc is called Princess’ Madness (and gah, I hate that title), which occurs immediately after TC and also features Leo as the main character. Hopefully plotting it out won’t take too long.


(… it will though. Who am I kidding?)

Princess' Madness makes me giggle. As long as it doesn't involve a creepy fairy, I'm happy.

But yayomagaz you're still writing it. Will you be posting some? Soon? Please? And if I were you, I'd make up an organisation plan with excel; I did one with the list of chapters, a short description of them, the word count, the total word count, days left (I've set myself the date of my birthday), necessary average words per day to reach that target, average words per day so far, days passed etc. It's actually really cool and it's great to keep all your thoughts together, but also to make sure you keep to a schedule. Just a suggestion.

Feel free to let me know when the next one's up.

Entry Five
-- ‘I can’t believe you like writing too - obviously we should have sex.’

Well, I wrote the plan faster than I thought I would. Huh, who knew. I planned more than I intended to as well, and did a bit of world building whilst I was at it. I mean, okay, I stayed up until 5 am doing this, but hey, who needs sleep, really?

So, I’ve started writing the first chapter of the first draft of The Princess section of the novel. (I’ve changed its name from Princess’ Madness to simply The Princess. It doesn’t really matter that much, as the name won’t find its way into the actual novel, but I have a folder on my computer named after it, and I didn’t like cringing every time I opened it.) So, yeah, the writing’s coming along okay.

At Blinky’s suggestion, I’ve set myself a deadline - I want to get the first draft of the novel done by the Summer holidays. To do that, I need to write 1,000 words a day, almost every day. That’s a lot of words to write - hope I manage it okay.


(… tried this before though, loads of times, and failed every time. Poop.)