Taking Stock
In my day job, project management is a huge thing we stress. My employer has a variety of methodologies and processes to ensure projects remain on schedule and reach their desired outcome. They all have acronyms and flowcharts and a lot of other stuff that’s probably trademarked, but the first step in a lot of those processes is to first take a step back and assess the situation.
So, taking stock. Got out the old cork board and wrote down each and every one of the chapters or chapter stand ins I have in Scrivener. Comes to 36. That’s high level, a lot of these will get separated or combined and it will come out to a number I like better.
After that, I categorized everything into blue, yellow, or red. All of the cards I marked as blue are the sections that I’m good with. They need polish, but the content is consistent with the rest of the story and I’m confident will make the final draft mostly as is. The cards marked as yellow are those that need some work, either in story content or serious polish to prose. Those marked in red either don’t exist, or exist in a form that I know has to be rewritten and I am confident will largely be altered for the final product.
Count: (And this would be a table, but I just discovered you can’t put a table in WordPress, joy.)
- Blue: 14
- Yellow: 9
- Red: 13
This is about where I thought I was. Almost all of those blues are in the beginning, and almost all the red are at the end, with the yellows mixed in in the middle/end. The plan is to convert all red and yellow to blue by the end of the month. Already, I am asking myself how in the hell people write a whole novel in a month’s time and thinking about all of the personal or professional obligations I have that are going to make this impossible.
None of that matters.
Here’s what does.
I have four weeks in the month of November. Weeks one through three will be dedicated to knocking out twelve of the thirteen red-marked sections, with four being completed per week. The thirteenth (which is actually the book’s epilogue), and the yellow marked cards will be completed the final week.
I have another ten cards on which I wrote general themes, characters, foreshadowing, just stuff I want to strengthen. That pile will get larger as I go through this, a living list of micro story arcs that need to be shored up for the final draft.
This would be the part where one of my bosses would ask my confidence in getting this done, as well as what risks I see to my deliverables or timeline. It’s easy to say all those aforementioned obligations don’t matter, a lot harder to actually operate that way. Work, both mine and my wife’s, are probably the biggest issues, coupled with Thanksgiving at the end of the month. Generating daily, consistent writing and an explosion of activity during the weekends will be essential.
Either way, see you tomorrow.
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