A New Process - Using Scapple and Scrivener

I posted earlier about the Scapple for Windows pubic beta, and wanted to use it so I can do a proper writeup on it. In order to do that though, I need a project. I've decided to use The Ship of the Unforgotten as my guinea pig. I've been working through editing that for some time, doing little touch edits for the Wattpad version I've been posting.

I figured that would make a pretty good project to play with in Scapple because it's the longest work I've written to date, and so it's been giving me some issues even with the advantage of using Scrivener. I've been longing for a way to separate out the sections of the story by storyline to get a real idea of how things flow and connect together, and to help me possibly add new sub-plots where necessary to flesh things out a bit or add to areas that are a little light right now.

Scrivener is a great organizational tool, but it doesn't have anything that REALLY fills that need. Scapple looks just about ideal for it. Thankfully, being products of the same developer, they seem to work pretty well together.

I was able to take the contents of my Scrivener binder for the book and just drag it whole into Scapple, and it took all of the "index card" data for every chapter and put it into Scapple as a note. 

Clearly my Scrivener file isn't set up ideally for this kind of import, so that's my next step; going through chapter by chapter and making sure the index card data for each is useful. Once that's done, I'll drag it all over again, and then I'll be able to work with each chapter as its own note, and rearrange it all, reconnect it all, and really visually see what's happening when with each character or group in the story.  

I figured I'd make this a bit of a behind-the-scenes series as I go, documenting the development of this new process, so stay tuned for more! 

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The Ship of the Unforgotten Chapter 27 Part 2 is Posted

I’m pretty encouraged by how much of my daily word count I’m managing to maintain in the wake of Camp NaNoWriMo for June. Last December after November’s event I found that my word count had dropped pretty low, into the 50-200 words a day range. I’m doing a lot better than that this time around. 

Hopefully with the August event coming up quickly, I’ll be able to maintain it all month and then reinforce it further. That ought to leave me in really good shape for September, with several months of high word counts behind me and two months “off” before NaNoWriMo 2012 begins.

Here’s another large chunk of chapter 27. I might have to write a little more to call it finished, but this is largely it. Tomorrow I go on to chapter 28!

The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 27 Pt. 2

Editing The Ship of the Unremembered

I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.

Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.

For the Win

Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.

Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.

What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.

Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.

The Home Stretch

Two days left, and still thousands of words left to go.

I’m confident I can do it easily enough; I have the next two days completely free and clear to focus on it and just get it done, so I’m not worried about the raw word count at all. In order to write really quickly though, I’m writing out of chronological order, tackling sections of the story as they filter through my mind and feel ready to write.

Because of that, I’m going to hold off on posting them here until I’ve finished, or at least until I have a long continuous stretch of story that begins where I last left off.

Wish me luck!