I have now switched over to my female protagonist and I’m somewhere in Act 2 for her (her act 1 is pretty much done, unlike my male protagonist).
Now, how am I measuring up against set goals? The honest truth is I don’t know. I am now fully in the tunnel and have absolutely no idea how long before I am about to exit it. So the broad goal of getting up to decimal draft 0.84? No idea, wait and see is my approach.
I also had the mini goal of getting clarity up to the mid-point for both my protagonists which again I have no idea whether I am going to reach or not by the end of this year. I left my male protagonist in a state of “Nope, I don’t know enough about this chapter, come back to it next time” etc. but obviously that is all the way in Act 3 because I always go through the whole story linearly and never stop in middles or jump around much when I write scenes (well, I do jump in a sense because with my iteration approach I often wrote on a piece of scrap paper which chapters I feel I am capable of working on for the current round of drafting for each of my protagonists. That has been the approach for the latest two or three rounds. But I don’t hopscotch all over the story in terms of scenes right off the bat). So to be honest, my male protagonist currently doesn’t even exist for me, that’s the type of myopia I am operating under when I am drafting. I am not quite up to the middle point yet for my female protagonist.
I feel like a structural analysis of the whole novel is coming up for the mini goal. I have said that I try to avoid it because it led to procrastination. But the honest truth is that I have no other method to delve into the story to see clarity otherwise.
This is the state I am at with the WIP. Tune in for the September update.
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