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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTo 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em> task?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now to figure out what I’m going to have for dinner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n