While I wasn’t paying attention, Round 3 of ROW80 ended. I had a busy week at work last week, so was behind on my blog reading–that’s my excuse, anyway! How did I do? I didn’t hit all my goals, but overall, not bad!
My overall goals for the Round were to: 1) publish the anthology in which my short story, “Time’s Tempest” will appear, and 2) Planning/outlining for Book 3 of the Saturn Society Series, and get 20,000 words down on that.
As I noted in my first post for Round 3, “The main catch is that I need stuff from other people for the anthology, and any goal that’s dependent on others carries an inherent risk.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened: I didn’t receive the materials from the coordinator, so the anthology has still not happened. I hope it still will, but at this point, it’s hard to tell when.
But on a more positive note, I did get my words in – over 21,000! I did some outlining and planning, too, just not enough of it, which shows in my results from last week.
Those goals were to write 4,000 more words and get four workouts in. The workouts just didn’t happen, and I only got 2,000 words in. The latter, I can attribute to one thing: I need to do more planning.
Some people can write by the seat of their pants–they start with an idea, and just write from there, hence the name “panters.” Those people amaze me. I’m an outliner. I need to plan. While I learned earlier this year that it actually is possible to write a short story without planning–in fact, it’s better not to–I just can’t do it for a novel. For this one, I tried a more skeletal form of planning, but even that has, at this point, failed me.
In other words, I’m stuck, and having tried this before, I know the reason is lack of planning. It isn’t lack of ideas–I have pages and pages of those. I just haven’t figured out how and in what order they fit together.
I should know better–I’m a software developer in my day job, and nowhere is it more true that Failure to Plan = Plan to Fail. I wouldn’t exactly say I failed to plan this time out, I just didn’t do enough of it, in an effort to cut corners and get writing sooner. And I also wouldn’t say I’ve failed in the writing either–I just need to step back from it and figure out what I’m doing. So that’s how I plan to spend my writing time this week.
Since ROW80 Round 4 doesn’t start back up until October 7th, I will probably take the next week off of blogging, and return with my Round 4 goals on Sunday, October 6th.
What about you–whether you write or not, have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to do more planning? If you participated in ROW80 this Round, how did you do? Please share – I’d love to hear from you!
Jennette Marie Powell writes stories about ordinary people in ordinary places, who do extraordinary things and learn that those ordinary places are anything but. In her Saturn Society novels, unwilling time travelers do what they must to make things right... and change more than they expect. You can find her books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and more.