Writing Update: Month of February

I’m trucking away at manuscript revisions, which are progressing slowly but steadily.

This past while, I’ve jumped around the manuscript quite a bit, which has been immensely helpful in keeping me engaged with the revision process. For whatever reason, I had started with the intent to work through the whole document from beginning to end, which—in such a strict sense—is not how I’ve ever revised other projects. However, I’ve found that I’m not always interested, *inspired* (for what that’s worth), or motivated to work on the next chronological spot.

Frankly, to me, the beginning of the manuscript is the most boring since it’s a lot of exposition, rather than the thick of the plot or character development. Obviously, the exposition is important, and the worldbuilding is interesting to me, but once I’ve done the worldbuilding and have it written out in rough form, I’ve not found myself super interested in going back to get it written less roughly (or, ideally, quite polished). When I’m reading books, I also rush through the beginning because I find the exposition boring. I just don’t like exposition. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Other than that, I’ve also been doing a fair amount of research as I’m writing. Researching technical things as well as seeing what other writers do in similar writing areas (a lot of this has been researching interesting worldbuilding). At times this gets a bit annoying when it interrupts the flow of my writing. At other times, I quite enjoy the research since I like going down the rabbit hole of topics and learning random things.

I’ve been adding a lot to the internal wiki that I’ve created for the manuscript, which has been super helpful in keeping information straight and organized. Highly recommend.

Finally, I typically write to specific music for a given piece. For short stories, this usually means one or two (maybe three) songs for the work. For the manuscript, I’ve started assigning music to each part. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier since it’s a huge part of my writing process, but we’re here now, so that’s what counts, I suppose. It sometimes takes a while to figure out the right writing song for a short story, so it’s been a challenge to do this for a manuscript with so many different sections, but I do think it’s helped my writing.

That’s all I’ve got for this update! See you next time.