January 10

Still struggling to write 2022 but I find my fingers trying to type 2020 instead of 2021 like you might expect.

I broke through the anxiety I’ve felt about “messing up” the 4th draft and dug into my new outline today. Once I got started, it felt really good. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about how I would change the shape of the story next time since I was a little more than halfway through draft 3. Some of those changes did make their way into the second half of that draft, but many of them have been waiting for this draft for a very long time.

January 11

Today was another outlining day. I’m trying to keep a positive outlook and stop viewing my progress only through the lens of word count, but I’m really struggling. It’s easier to say “I wrote 500 words today” than to say “I outlined six more scenes and think I’ve come up with a way to arrange them to give the B plot a more fulfilling arc”.

January 12

I’m starting to change the shape of the story in this outline. It’s scaring me but I’m also excited about it.

January 13

For the past few days I’ve been debating throwing the “note cards” for the scenes I know will conclude the first book into the Scrivener cork board and working backwards. Half my mind thinks it will help jump start my work each day to remember where I’m heading. The other half is certain that creating scene cards out of order is just going to make me waste time putting everything in the right order when I could just keep creating them in the right order.

January 14

Even though it is errands day and I’m usually drained of energy by errands, I’m actually still excited for this project. Granted, I’m excited to start writing and I’m so not ready to do that. It’s hard to resist the urge to just in and get started.

January 15

I was distracted by being stressed out about the upcoming snowstorm. It kinda killed my momentum. However, we met up with some friends at the laundromat and knocked out a chore and did a bit of socializing in one go. That was nice.

January 16

If I decided to call my feelings about the snowstorm stress yesterday, I don’t know what to call the escalation of those feelings today. At some point I did settle down and worked on my outline a bit more. Honestly, I didn’t get far.

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