Yay! I've kept this up for 3 days (well 2 of actual writing work). Got through the end of Book (Act) II. Didn't make as much progress as I thought, but I underestimated just how much material I had in hand for this section. It's both the section with the most meat and the most problems. Since it's inception, I had the ending and to some extent the beginning pretty clear in my mind (though I swear I have written a dozen variants on the opening chapter, all suitable, all compelling, but finally settled on one). The middle section had a solid through line, but how it was traveled has varied a lot and I needed to filter out a lot of potential ideas and get the singular plot worked out. Beyond that, it has the most need for exposition and working how what needed to be presented, what could be implied, and what was just backstory I needed to know for myself but needn't be explicitly revealed.
This section also has a lot more detail I wanted to capture as I'd written so much into this area already, so the ratio of post-it's to content is off compared to the previous act. That long strip in the third column adds up to maybe 2 chapters at best -previous notes are about 1 chapter per post-it.
As you can see, Act II occupies twice the board space and has a crap-ton of notes (green, blue and red). Ran out of Green Post-Its today, so I can't get much further until I run out late rand get more ;). All in all, I'm feeling pretty good about the process. I've been working from my Scrivener notes from about 6 months ago. I've made a good deal of changes as I go, but it's SO much easier taking this as one big text rather than picking at parts. Still, once I have this part all up on the board, I need to go through the last 6 months of notes I've written and see what I want to change, rearrange, add, etc. It's been hard to keep all this in my head, so who knows how much of this will make to the final.
I should keep in mind that if this actually gets finished, that there is plenty of room for future tales with these characters and the material that doesn't make the cut might find a home elsewhere. Today alone I uncovered what would make at least a few one-offs and the roots of 2-3 other adventures.
I realize suddenly that I haven't revealed a lick of what this is about. That should be coming out soonish. Just not ready to talk about it yet other than in the broad sense that this is my idea of an Epic Fairy Tale.
Now time for lunch and then off to get green post-its.
See you tomorrow.
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