Finally, finally, finally I have some actual writing progress to report!Yea me! Yes, I am cheering and clapping for myself just like my two-year-old son does for himself when he does something good.
So these are my amazing, stupendous, and all-around awesome accomplishments from the past week. Prepare to be impressed.
1. Did extensive rewrites on Chapter 1.
This includes adding an entirely new beginning, and reordering events so they all happen in chronological order (Yes, chronological order, it's so straight-forward. Who knew? Not that it was previously like my own version of Memento, but I did find myself doing quite a bit of doubling back to explain everything that was going on, so I started at a slightly earlier point in the narrative, and voila! order was achieved.)
2. Put together a Word document with all the basic info. on my story and characters.
Since my WIP is Urban Fantasy I found myself having some trouble keeping track of all the rules of my world.
I also needed a place to write down all my characters names, I have a terrible habit of forgetting the names of minor characters, and then when they make a reappearance in the story 50 or 100 pages later instead of going back to remember the name I originally gave them, I'll just give them another name so I don't have to interrupt my flow. As you might imagine, this can get confusing.
I also listed all the changes I needed to make from fixing indiscrepancies in my timeline to adding more world-building details to clarifying the motivations for different characters. There was at least fifteen of them when I was done, and for next week my goal is to start going through them one by one.
3. Wrote a new query letter.
Having decided that my previous attempt at a query letter was pretty feeble, I tossed it out and started from scratch. Like anyone with any kind of sense at all I consider writing query letters to be a special kind of torture, second only to writing synopses. *shudders* Oh, I really hate synopses.
What I really needed to make the whole process easier was a guide, something that would break the whole thing down for me step-by-step. As luck would have it, such a thing exists at the Querytracker.net blog. Written by Elana, (who also happens to be one of the best query letter writers around) her soon to be patented technique, took me from the beginning hook all the way through to everything else you need to do in a query - like those pesky bio paragraphs.
There are actually five parts to this series in all, (sorry, I was too lazy to link to all of them) and what I did was start right at the beginning with the hook and write that part of the letter, and then I followed the helpful link at the end of that entry onto the next one where I then wrote that part of the letter, and on and on until I was done.
I'm not going to say that it was easy, but I did not at any point feel the need to grab hold of head and scream at the ceiling, "WWWHHYYY??" And most importantly, at the end of it I had what I think is a halfway decent query letter.
So those are my three big accomplishments from the past week, and as I've previously mentioned I am darn proud of them.
How about you? Are you feeling proud of your progress from this past week?
And if you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.
For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.
Feel free to also make use of the lovely little WIP Wednesday logo as well!
