Checking in after another pair of combination days. While I didn’t get very much done yesterday, I managed to make up for the lull today. Today was the point at which I used all of my updated character, plot and setting information to recreate the portion of the story that I had already planned out. Everything is now current and proceeding along smoothly.
This is a lot more important than it sounds – it’s a bit like cleaning an old closet that you’ve been shoving your extra unused junk into for years. You may know precisely where everything is in there, and you’ve learned to deal with the mess over the years, but there’s still nothing quite like getting rid of the stuff you frankly will never use again, and making space and time for the things that should have been there all along. It doesn’t advance me toward my goal of completion, but it does mean that I don’t have old or unnecessary baggage weighing me down now that I’m ready to progress.
Speaking of which, today was also the day when I realized that I have come to the end of my previously created content. As I think I mentioned, I started the Write-A-Thon with half of an extremely rudimentary outline. That also meant half of an extremely rudimentary story. All the additional stuff I have added since sitting down and working with what I already had has helped me shore up a lot of the places where the story was weakest. Today, I sat down and took stock of all the plot threads that I’ve integrated into the story in the process of doing that, in order to see which of them I still needed to work in between the place where I am now (about halfway through) and the end of the story.
Traditionally, this is the part in any story where I panic. I like middles even less than I like endings, because to me, it always feels like I’m struggling to make the middle relevant. There’s nothing worse than a middle that makes the reader feel like he or she is being strung along just to make the page count more impressive. What you write in middles has to matter just as much as what you write at the beginning and the end. Everything that happens has to have some purpose, or it’s just fluff. Fluff belongs in pillows and bunny rabbits, not books or games!
I figured out a neat trick today, though. In making a list of the things I still needed to bring closure to in my story, I was able to separate them out into two columns that I think will serve as two additional game chapters. (I’m calling the different plot segments of the game chapters still. They’re the same as you’d expect from a book.) They fit together nicely. Even the couple that didn’t fit immediately into one or the other were easily placed due to size and timing requirements. The two lists, as they stand now, are my road map through the next and final chapters. I now know how I’m going to get to my end. I know the full story. I know where this is going. I can do this.
Tomorrow, I’m going to put every bit of energy I have into doing the pre-outline for these chapters, so that they’re no longer vague intimations of what needs to happen, but a solid “here’s what’s happening in this chapter.” I’m expecting to be very busy and very tired when I’m done, since all of this will be new writing, not editing and updating what I had before. This may be one of the biggest work days since I started the Write-A-Thon. Because I was hoping to have my complete outline done by this coming Monday, I’m probably going to have to work this weekend to make sure that gets done. But moving from pre-outline to outline is easy. Moving from nothing at all to pre-outline is the hard part. If I can get that done tomorrow, I’ll consider myself winning the game.
If you haven’t decided to become a sponsor yet, and you’re interested, I would feel so much more motivated during my intense work session tomorrow if you donated a little something to the cause! I can’t guarantee it will make the work any easier, but I do know it would make it more fun, and better for Clarion. We’re coming up on two weeks now, and I’ve already gotten more work done over these two weeks than I normally get done in a month. If that’s not testimony to the cause, then I don’t know what is!
