Pushing Through the Huntsman

Things are a little rough right now. I’m in the middle of working the barn 7 days a week (with one coworker) for two and a half weeks. I’ve done a pretty good job of losing track of what day it is, and I’ve been grumpy, tired, and watching a lot of Supernatural.

As such, I’ve gotten very little writing done. But not none, because I like writing and I want to write. I made a bit of a breakthrough a week ago with the order of some scenes in a few chapters, and then hit the wall of the most underdeveloped part of the story. My brain’s a little lacking in the “organizing the overall plan” space right now, so it’s probably harder than it should be.

But, as you may have seen in my newsletter, my plan is to have some alpha readers look at the Huntsman at the end of July. Last time I had my hubby read it. He was able to give me some very good advice that cleaned up a lot of things and I’m hoping this time will do the same. It would probably really help for me to have writer friends who are willing to do critiques, but I’m not strong at making friends.

I still have work through this weekend, and then I’ll be back to my regular schedule. It’ll probably take me a day or so to get back into the swing of things, but after that the plan is to plow ahead full speed and get the Huntsman as ready as I can make it. Right now I have 11ish chapters left. (41k words) Things are rather haphazard at the end of the story, so I can’t really count on those to be anywhere near the same amount of words or work to bring them up to snuff.

My first job will be organizing the scenes I have written into a workable order, sight right now they’re mostly scenes I wrote totally independently of each other, all stuck into the same part of the story. Then I need to make sure all of the elements I need are in there, and then smooth it out a bit. That, of course, being the least important bit, since my alpha readers will know it’s a little rough. I actually left notes in the story when I had my hubby read it to warn him at two distinct points when the amount of polish took a moderate, then severe nosedive. He still got through it enough to help me out.

Anyway, so measurable goal: By the end of next Sunday I will organize though Gabir’s turning point, which is approximately three chapters. All scenes need to be orange, which means all of the elements are in the scene, even if it’s not perfectly readable.