Spooky season is well and truly here… and I have a little crochet project to show for it. For once, I’ve prepared something seasonal in adequate time to actually use it in the season it’s celebrating. This little pumpkin beret was a free design someone I follow linked to from Ravelry. Here’s my attempt at it with some delightfully soft chenille wool:
As for writing, I did in fact finish my first draft, and well ahead of schedule, too. I decided right at the start of the month that I wanted to make some major changes that would completely alter the events going forward in my story. So, against the general rule of thumb that completing a draft, no matter how badly it turns out, is better than starting over midway through, I finished my first draft roughly 25k words short of where I planned to.
Draft 2
All is not lost, though! I’m only around 20k words into this second draft after spending a week or so amending my outline to accommodate these hefty changes and the butterfly effect they had on the plot as a whole, but already this draft is feeling a lot stronger than the one that came before. Where the first draft was definitely a lot of exploration and experimentation, this second version gives a lot more insight into the characters. I’m also finding writing the dialogue much easier now that I have a more defined idea of what each character’s personality is like, as well as having distinguished various local dialects in more detail than I had when I was writing the first draft.
There’s also a lot to be said of the most significant change I made: switching the narrative character of my secondary POV. While I don’t want to give away too much of what this POV entails, I will say that writing from this new character’s perspective has allowed me to flesh out an important aspect of my book’s world that was pretty hazy first time around. For how much importance this aspect has to the overall plot, I’m honestly surprised I didn’t plan out more of its detail before starting the first draft.
I shan’t waste too much time criticising my younger self; they got me here as surely as the me writing this now is helping get me to the point where this book might be published. It’s all part of the process: both of learning, and of this project specifically.
Next Month’s Goals
October: the spookiest month of them all! It also comes with a good helping of events within the creative online sphere: Inktober, Flufftober, and Kinktober, to name just a few. Inktober itself is geared towards artists in the most traditional sense rather than writers, but it’s the one I’m planning on participating in this year.
Its aim is to get artists to create a regular habit of drawing — with the purpose of using ink specifically to prevent being drawn into that cycle of constant amendment — and to share it with others. Now, I’m not much good at drawing, but I can apply this idea to my own craft. After all, writing is an art in a more loose sense.
Every day of October, I will be hand-writing one page of flash fiction based on these prompts:
This serves two important purposes for me: first of all, to take my craft away from my laptop for a while. While I adore the versatility of having various different software that each allow me to approach the writing process in a different way, there is something uniquely valuable to writing the words out by hand. Secondly is to step away from my current WIP. I won’t be stopping writing it over October, but getting some unrelated writing out there should help keep my creative juices flowing in a way that editing — even at a first-round structural edit level — doesn’t quite meet.
If I really get into it, I might even bring out my typewriter for a few of the days! Who knows what this opportunity will spark into. Hopefully, not too many stray plot bunnies, for the sake of Jewel Tones getting completed.