It’s been pretty dead all week.  People are already headed out to visit family and hunkering down for turkey preparations.  For Thanksgiving dinner, I visited family locally, the first time in two years.

Earlier in the week, I picked up a book called Be A Writing Machine, which is written by an indie writer who is also a pantser.  So no, ‘You gotta outline to write fast,” which is in a lot of books.  I should note he also has a pocket guide for pantsing and one on advanced editing for indie authors.

The book mentioned a “nuclear option” for writing, which means shutting everything out to write.  So I did that, because it required a real mental shift. 

Then instinct told me to write the next scenes out of order. And it helped me get over the hump I was struggling with. But I also did a few more things:

  1. I’d been writing the story in Word. As I got further along in the story, I started having trouble getting a feel for where I was in the story. So, since I’d lost my original serial number for Scrivener (I was a beta tester for the first version), I bought version 3. Ported the story into it. Found yet more typos that Grammarly did catch. Yeah, I really need that editing book above. But once I separated the climax scenes into separate text files, it helped me mentally because I could see right there I really didn’t have that much to do (we’re talking 3K tops).
  2. I skipped one scene that was sticking me so I could write out of order. I normally don’t need to do this, but changing things up helps.

I still have to write that one scene, add the epilogue/Validation (always the very last thing I write).  But on Friday, it’ll be a full cycling pass, just make sure all the loose ends are tied up. And I’ll take a gander at that editing book and see if I can use anything before I ship this to the first phase of editing: Continunity.

Story completion is in sight.  Land Ho!