Episode #216: When Nothing To Do Becomes A Prompt For...Writing?

My local Dollar Tree store has got all kinds of Spring/Summer season planting items, from potting soil to flower seeds, and everything else in between. Like tiny garden figurines such as what you see here. I have four of these little buggers scattered about my den, keeping watch over the various items that I possess, like myself.

Today's post is about when you hit that self-imposed rest area on your writing journey and suddenly you need a little something to occupy your time. In my particular case, I had just finished book #3 of my four volume low fantasy series with the blog tag called Hot Mess, and I wanted to take a mini-mental health break before diving back into the land of volume #4.

The first two weeks of my mental health break were spent putting all of the final pieces together for my new novella The Mortality Of Familial Love, of which creating A+ marketing content for the book was the absolute final piece (waiting for approval right now) of the publishing puzzle. 

After finishing that interesting piece of advertising (many thanks to KDP for providing step-by-step instructions), I found myself with absolutely nothing to do and all day to do it. This, my good reader, was not a good thing to undergo. I didn't want to get back into the grind of writing that fourth volume just yet, but I also didn't want to radically change my morning routine, which was spending approximately 1 1/2 hours writing prior to my morning walk. Thus, we decided to have a waltz with the ginormous animal that had been periodically, and with even temperament, persistently nagging me to write....GASP!...a proper outline for that final volume of my low fantasy series.

Now this is pretty much a foreign concept to me, as I thought that writing a story should come pretty naturally and one should use their memory and plan on the fly while writing (aka "pantsing" or "being a pantser"). This memory thing quickly went down the drainpipe as I realized that trying to keep track of multiple characters and plot points in my head was not feasible. So that'ss when I came up with the idea of printing out my chapters of my work as I progressed along, mostly to use for reference and editing notes.

I have been doing this for the better part of several years now, and it really has helped me maintain the sanity/stability that I need in order to properly function as a writer. But, it has now gotten to the point, at least with this series, where I really need to step up my game with a better tracking system for this series.

To whit: I currently have about 6 distinct plot lines going that I will need to make sure that they finish to a satisfactory conclusion, good or bad. I'm also dealing with the fact that there are eleven major character changes going into the fourth volume that I must properly work into the overall story, which includes four prominent deaths, five serious woundings and two defections.

Now, I have been able to negate some of the persistent nagging about a proper outline, in that I managed to create, 39 pages and counting, a chapter-by-chapter highlight guide (aka bullet points) of exactly where this story is heading. Still, it's an idea that is slowly wearing me down, only because I'm coming to the realization that with at least 6 distinct plot lines going, I really do need pull it all together so that it makes perfect sense at the end. I really can't afford to write a half dozen or so pages on a particular tangent only to belatedly realize that the tangent doesn't mesh with what was written previously.

So after talking it over with myself, especially when I decided to start on another short story to keep myself occupied (very, very wrong thing to do), I broke down and resigned myself to a fate worse than inspecting microfilm: writing a proper outline for the final volume. And suffice to say, after three handwritten pages in, which translates to about 1 1/4 pages typed, it's turning out to be something that I'll pretty much grow to loathe in the coming weeks/months.

But, as they say, you can't always go through life like a Luddite. Sometimes you just have to join the modern age of using the tools that you loathe the most that will help you perfectly achieve your goals.

Happy Monday to one and all, and remember, you are as old as you feel young!*

*quote from an old Popeye cartoon of the late 50's/early 60's. Made absolutely no sense then or now, but it always stuck in my memory like a bad video earworm.

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