New Look, Who Dis?

First a little housekeeping. This email is coming to you via Kit, a new email provider. I've made this change because MailerLite just halved the number of subscribers on its free plan. Not that I'm anywhere close to that limit, but this change signals the start of a process that Cory Doctorow so aptly named enshittification, and I've seen that process elsewhere, like at MailChimp, which has become borderline useless over time. I know I'm complaining about a service I get for free, but I figured sooner or later I'd wind up over here on Kit anyway, and although this is a "14 day free trial", a little digging around shows that after that it should switch to a "free" plan, depriving me of a list of features I won't need until much later. If for some reason that's not the case, it will be back to the old look in no time. Just another joy of running on a thin budget.

We now return to your irregularly scheduled newsletter.

On Productivity

This update is somewhat roundabout, but really it's about making progress!

I've probably mentioned more than once that my writing process is plot first, and pretty nerdy-analytical. The program I use for writing is novelWriter, which in itself is nerdy, with a plain text editor and Markdown-like syntax for organizing and formatting the text. One of the things I love about it is that it lets authors maintain metadata about a scene alongside the prose for that scene, instead of having to track things in a separate spreadsheet.

I built a program to go into a novelWriter project and extract that metadata into a spreadsheet that gives me a high-level overview of the whole story. It has the mundane title NovelWriterExtract and I have posted more about it on my projects pages (link below). This program has been incredibly useful since my revised story threads in two new plot lines and a cast of characters to support them. Doing that has helped me do things like make sure the description of a location happens the first time that location shows up in the revised story. This entails a lot more than just moving text around, since now a different character is the first to encounter a place, and that character's attitude to the place can be vastly different than in the original version. While the physical attributes of the space are the same, the character's emotional response to it can be very different.

Pulling snapshots of the metadata out has made it much easier to spot and fix problems like that, which has been a great help. What's not great is I'm not making as much progress at getting this draft done as I want to. There have been some good reasons for that, but as those reasons got resolved, my pace didn't pick up, and that makes me unhappy. Some authors motivate themselves by setting daily or weekly word count goals, but I couldn't see that working well for me. Inevitably something will cause me to miss a target, and that will make me feel bad, and... well it's all downhill from there. I recently saw a great video that describes the problem I (and apparently many other autistic/ADHD folks) have with this sort of goal setting. There's a link to it below.

What has helped me in the past is a graphical representation of how much (or in this case how little) progress I make over time. So I updated my extract tool to pull out some statistics including a more accurate word count and what state my scenes were in (outline, draft, et. al.) then I went back and got similar data from older snapshot spreadsheets and plotted my progress. My expectation in doing this was to document how I'd stalled and use it to prove to myself that I need to get my butt in gear. What I discovered is that my progress over time has been ludicrously linear. The word-count to time graph is darn close to a straight line. What I thought was a bunch of ups and downs is actually slow (but still painfully slow), steady progress.

Now that those external factors are mostly settled, my objective is to change the slope of that line, get words in there more rapidly until this draft is complete. Then I get to use the extract tool to look at other parts of the story's structure and start to hone the prose into something more polished. In that phase, word counts become less important as they will go up and down, possibly drastically. Instead it will be how the status of scenes evolves from "Draft 1" to "Draft 2". When the second draft starts to close in on 100%, then it will be time to line up a developmental editor, and getting from there to a "Final Draft" will, I hope, be a relatively smooth process (gleefully ignoring the dreaded possibility that the developmental edit sends me back to a major revision cycle). From there it should be clear sailing through the final editing stages and finalizing cover design. By then the whole launch process should be underway, and I'll finally, finally have a launch date.

Then work on the second novel can really get moving!

Links

• ​novelWriter, a tool for writing novels.
• The NovelWriterExtract project.
• ​Guilt-Free Progress Tracker (YouTube video).

What I've Been Reading

Drystone, a Life Rebuilt, by Kristie De Garis I can't say enough about this memoir. A book has to be really good or mildly disappointing for me to review it, and this is definitely in the first category. Read my review on The Story Graph.

The Blind Spot: A Cyberpunk Thriller by Michael Robertson Competently written but otherwise meh. Review.

Kenai by Dave Dobson Winner of the 2024 SPSFC Award (self-Published Science Fiction Competition). A generally good story once you wrap your head around the unusual temporal mechanics. Good to see a female protagonist with some depth of character. It's interesting, and — well — anything but inspiring, to see the "business reports" he posts on his blog. The short version is that even if you manage to win a real award, financial success as an indie author can be a long way off.

Amusement Time

I'm going to start closing my newsletters with images that I found amusing while spending too much time on social media (almost always that means on Mastodon). Here's the first!