Heir To Magic

I have started working on Heir to Magic again.  I am approaching it with a new scheme for writing. I started to plot it out using index cards like I had the first time, but I have changed my schemes and am instead going to try recreating the novel entirely in yWriter.

I’ve downloaded the latest edition of yWriter, yWriter5, which was released this past December. I can never thank Simon Haynes enough for allowing his fellow writers to make use of such a wonderful tool for writing. Particularly now as I am striving to get my novel salvaged from the scrambled mess that is my brain, sleep deprivation, stress and cold having made my brain so useless that I am still trying to write this single post over 14 hours after I began working on it.

Writing the novel is going to be a very very slow process. ::sigh::

My first step, after downloading yWriter5, has been to create a new project and put 25 chapters in it. I have now began creating the scenes that I can remember and putting them in chapters that are roughly where the scene will be in the finished novel. I then select “Tools > Display scene list” and bring up a box showing the scenes in the novel along with (among other information) what chapters each scene is in, word counts, POV character and a brief description of the scene. From here I can print this listing to allow me to sit back in a chair, watching the fire in the fireplace as I make notes about what scenes are missing and which ones I need to move around.

I’m currently waiting for my printer driver to download (at 19% as I write this), so I can work on the scenes later tonight, for now, I am going to go find something that might help me wake up some - or maybe take a nap… I haven’t decided.

For a limited time you can join me in Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways course.  This is a self-paced course, so you don’t have to worry about not having the time, and trust m when I say I understand money being an issue (I’m a family caregiver, that is the highest stress unpaid job in the world), so it was simply amazing to me that Holly can offer her course for a price even I can afford - just $47 a month.  And it is billed monthly, so if I decide that I can’t afford it or want to stop for some reason, I only have to pay for the months I have been a student, not for the entire course.

As I said, you have a chance to enroll in the course.  From now until 9:00 a.m. on September 8th, enrollment is open for new students.  You need to check the course out soon though, because trust me when I tell you that this is one that you don’t want to miss the deadline on.

In just the first week I leaned what it was that was keeping me from finsihing Heir to Magic after all these years, and how to overcome those barriers.  In the weeks that have followed I have learned how to take an idea and reshape it from an idea I want to write, to being an idea that I simply must write.  How to craft ideas into something I will be excited about not just as I am writing it, but during the long process of fine tuning through revision and on to publication.

I know now how to form ideas for short stories and novels that are right for me, and am currently learning how to target those to the right markets.

I encourage you not to miss out, even if you don’t decide to enroll now, you should at least visit the How to Think Sideways website and find out more about what it has to offer so you will be ready to pounce the next time enrollment opens (I have no idea when that might be, so my advice is not to miss out this time).

I’ve been taking an online writing course, so between that and keeping up with the work that pays the bills, my work on Heir to Magic has been a little sidetracked. I have not stopped working on Heir to Magic, just got a little sidetracked away from it as I take a course that will hopefully assist me in getting the novel finished and finding a publisher for it.

The course is Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways and I have just entered into week five of the lessons.  I can already tell that the entire course is going to be something I am going to learn a lot from, and the things I learn from it will be invaluable for my career as a writer.

I have added another 189 words to my novel.  I had to go down to the doctor’s office with my dad today, get a blood test for him, so while we sat in the waiting room, I worked on my novel.  Did not have a very long wait, but enough to get another almost 200 words on the novel.  I started off a scene that I know will make it into the final version of the novel, so it is even a good expenditure of my writing time.

I also got my March/April issue of Poets & Writers today.  I was reading the Editor’s Note, and Ms. Gannon said something I found very interesting, something I want to do myself.  It seems that she has a journal where she notes down her favorite sentences in novels she reads.  I read that and just went “Oh kewl!” because there have been a lot of times over the years where I would read a passage I particularly loved, but I never thought to make a record of them in a journal.  I have no idea how Ms. Gannon makes her entries, but I would think the best method for me would be to enter the passage that I loved, then the book, author and page number where the passage was to be found.  That way I can always find it again in the books in my library.

Something else that caught my attention in Poets & Writers is an article about writer workshops, in particular what is wrong  with them.  I bookmarked that for careful reading when I get a chance to read it.

Only other item of writing note is that I got my renewal for Writer’s Digest mailed off today.  I’ve been trying to get that mailed off for some time, so I was glad to have got it out the door finally.  Now I just have to mail in the talking books deal for my dad.  Should get that done by Friday.

I need to move a website that I had created called Wyvern’s Crest, so instead of losing all of the information that I had wrote for it, I decided that I would move the some of the information over here, onto Heir to Magic, instead.  It is mostly things on castles and dragons and ships anyway, so it will fit in perfectly with the information that I need for Heir to Magic.

I want to try and reconfigure things here anyway, create a site that is more like what I am trying to create, so moving that stuff over here will help with that endeavor as well.  I want Heir to Magic to not only track my efforts to write my novel, but to be a place where I can have a virtual scrapbook that contains all of my notes and efforts and everything.  Let you, dear reader, see what I have been doing as I work to bring my novel to life.

So, please bear with me as I try to sort out the best way to create the world that I have dreamed about.