It’s a thoroughly rainy Saturday: perfect for writing.
To be honest, it hasn’t been one of those dancing-through-meadows-of-daisies kinds of months, at least as far as writing mojo is concerned. Nevertheless, I did complete the chapter I started before the whole “white nationalist attempted coup” thing, sent it to beta, and started storyboarding for the next.
There’s a way in which storyboarding is a glorified means of procrastination for me, but the glorified part is useful: ordinary procrastination is about the paralysis of perfectionism, but storyboarding gives me something to do while I negotiate myself an acceptable level of not-perfect to get started with.
And it often turns out to be useful! In this case, I had some things to figure out to illuminate the immediate path forward. Like whose POV to introduce where and at what vantage point; what’s happening in one location while X is happening in the other; what tempo to start with so that it accelerates in the right place; trajectories for characters I’m just getting to know…
My usual MO is, as I’ve said, pretty analog — index cards and notepad scratches and sticky-notes with quotations and bits of dialogue jotted for later reference. But this week I also made a personal Miro account to keep track of the larger items. I’d been using it for a rolling workflow project at work; while their templates are attractive and (probably) useful, what I like is just having a virtual whiteboard for keeping sticky-notes in color-coded order, and drawing my own lines between text elements. I want to design it myself, dammit — which is the main reason I couldn’t get along with my trial of Scrivener. I will decide how section breaks and chapters are to be designed, thank you very much.
I hear that Scrivener also has a character naming function that you can use for minor characters and extras, which sounds cool when you’ve been faffing about on Behind the Name for an hour or two, but I suspect there’s a similar options funnel, and just, no. Sadly, though, BTN is rather thin on African names (like, hey, it’s a Really Big Continent, right?), so I’ve had to extrapolate somewhat to name a couple of Southern Consortium characters. Coding a more-developed quasi-empire to the Global South should be an interesting endeavor, to say the least. But what’s the fun in setting oneself an easy task?
Today, I’ve put in some satisfying work: finished a scene introducing a character POV, copied in a scene-plug from my greenhouse and cleaned it up, and sketched plans for the transitional material between the two. Not bad for a rainy Saturday.
Now to figure out what I’m going to have for dinner.