October 2015: Digging Right Now

Digging Right Now Oct15It’s a brand new month! Well, it’s the end of a brand new month, but I have new faves this month, all the same. (I  misspelled that bran both times, as if I’m feeling irregular or something.) I finished my second 1950s novella and I’m plotting my third (and final) one to hopefully pound out during NaNoWriMo.


logo-medium-landscape-26c12ce547f22c15ed6d3227f65708d2There’s this awesome new website called One Stop for Writers. It’s by the maker or Scrivener and the writers of the Emotional Thesaurus. It’s so amazing, you guys. Setting thesaurus, idea generators, Color and Pattern Thesaurus, Positive Traits and Negative Traits… I could go on and on. I won’t, but I could. It costs $9 per month (if you pay monthly, with discounts if you pay every 6 months or yearly) and it’s worth every penny.

Know how I said once that I couldn’t write with index cards? I went into all the reasons they didn’t work for me. Well, that’s not so true now. Process evolves. In the past, the very looseness of it bothered me; now the lack of rigidity (so, yeah, the looseness) is exactly what gets my muse all excited. I’ve been using them to plot (which I also did with my first 1950s novel) and I’m halfway through a scene-by-scene outline. (I know that probably scares the hell out of you pantsers.)

This book. Ohmygosh, you guys. This is the best book on structure I’ve ever read! And I’ve read several. In fact, I consider myself something of a structure connoisseur. I sort of am in love with structure because if your structure is off, it’s all off.

Anyway, K.M. Weiland goes through every piece of three-act story structure and walks you through what it means, how it looks in four different stories, and even a list that narrows down exactly what each piece should have. And that’s just the first 60% of the book (all I’ve read so far). The last slightly-less-than-half is about scene structure, and I’m really excited to read more on that. I can tell you that this has inspired me in my plotting of this new story.

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