Saving Grace: Finished for the Week

I had hoped to have the Saving Grace snowflake finished by this time, but that didn’t happen. Even so, it was a great week for writing.

Today, I worked on Step Eight, which is listing the scenes. It’s less of a creative process and more of a sequencing process at this stage because the story has been summarized so many times from so many view points in previous steps, that I know most of what’s going to happen. There are a couple of gaps, but for the most part, it’s all about the order in which things happen.

The story has advanced over 33,000 words this week, most of it through plotting and development. I’m still not finished but every day of work I put into the design makes the story a little more solid and makes me a little more confident about bringing everything together when writing begins.

This week also saw the highest and second highest daily word counts so far this year. On Thursday, total word count was 10,435. That included blog posts, journaling, Saving Grace and anything else I wrote. That’s the best output so far this year and only the second time I’ve written over 10,000 words in a single day. (The first time was back in November, during NaNoWriMo).

Today was the second highest word count. I didn’t make 10,000 today, but came very close with 9,781. Amazing.

Tomorrow is a break from painting and creative writing. A chance to let the dust settle and to let the subconscious work on some of the plotting questions with which I’m ending the week.

The first objective next week will be finishing the snowflake. A couple of days on finishing Step Eight, then I will either spend the rest of the week on Step Nine to flesh out the scenes or go directly to writing. That will depend on how I feel about the design when Step Eight is finished. If there are no questions remaining, writing begins. If questions remain, I’ll take the time to do Step Nine.

By the way, the process is a Ten Step Plan, with Step Ten being writing the story. So we’re almost there!

But to be honest, I’ve had so much fun developing the snowflake design, I’ll be a little bit sad to leave it behind and begin telling the story….

Not!