I’m currently working on draft 0.82. To be honest, I’m not making major headways in the most recent few decimal drafts. More and more, it’s about letting go of scenes that were 70% done and acknowledging that I don’t have the mentality or whatever to push it through the 100% mark right now and choosing to leave it to a future date where progress on other sections would make me ‘click’ on the missing parts. But overall, I’m just pushing forward on it, ticking off more and more chapters. For my female protagonist, I’ve at least pushed beyond Act 1 in the most recent decimal draft. I think this is a non-trivial achievement since for her the norm of writing scenes linearly stuck like glue compared to my male protagonist. Actually, I should mention that when I found out that I could jump between scenes at different places of the story for my male protagonist, it was a surprise- I never thought I could do that, ever. But when I tried to do that for my female protagonist, nope, not going to happen. But ah well, you work with what you got.
The other aspect is that I can feel a general flagging of enthusiasm towards my novel projects. It first started with the WIP so I was switching to the next tentative project and trying to outline it in between my decimal drafts. But recently, I can feel that my writing heat has gone towards my gaming in that I’m trying to take a hand at being Game Master (or GM) for my gaming group. So I’ve put together 3 different mini-settings already before I’m currently infatuated with this setting that I’m adapting from this Chinese online novel. How I’m using that for my novels is that I’m trying to set up working for my gaming setting as a reward for doing my WIP writing sessions. So far how that’s working out is, to be honest, sketchy. I think this is at least partly, or perhaps mainly I’m not sure, due to the getting out-of-practice with drafting that I last did for the WIP (I switched to freewriting before I broke off the last decimal draft on the WIP and then I switched to outlining the next tentative novel project). I’ve been writing daily now (not necessarily the same type of writing every day but some form of writing) even though I’ve trimmed down my days on the WIP to be 5 days a week instead of 6 days (when I was doing 6 days a week, I was not writing daily, I believe, but my memory is not one of my strongest points). And yet, I’ve found that there are different types of writing muscles apparently for many types of writing. On top of it, I’ve found my mood and the particular scene that I’m working on the day seems to play a far larger role on my outputs and my procrastination urges for any given writing session.
I’ve also recently switched to the hidden protagonist for this book 1 (I might have alluded to the fact that this series started off as having 4 POVs/protagonists, I trimmed back two but then I thought I would bring back a 3rd but not until book 2 in full force) to see if that freshen things for me. I’ve just wrapped this up on Friday. I did get some insights into this hidden protagonist’s psyche and other things that count as progress on the WIP. But in terms of enthusiasm, it’s the same.
To sum up for this year, I’m on track with my goals (although now I’ve switched to planning daily tasks as opposed to having monthly and yearly goals). 2022 is a new year and I will still write on.
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