My manuscript is going very well this month so I am pretty happy about that. So far, I have written just under one thousand words. I put over two thousand words in an out file. Clearly, I write much better when I know the direction I'm going. Being prepared has always helped give me confidence.
I have made the decision to scrap the first two thousand words of my manuscript. After a week with the flu, and reading a book written by Beth Revis called Paper Hearts, it just seems like the direction to go. The story is still the same but the way it will be written is going to be different. There were many mistakes that would have to be edited anyway so it's better to take care of them now.
This past weekend I finished reading a book about learning how to write better. It showed me what not to do in certain situations. The characters that I made were created without any flaws. The problem is that they are almost perfect. I mean, it’s okay to make your protagonist polite, but she was going to be good the entire book. Nobody in real life is that perfect. She needed to have some flaws or make a mistake somewhere.
Does anyone else set a reading goal for the year? For the last two years I have managed to make it happen. If you are not on Goodreads then you might want to take a look at it. It's a great place for keeping track of what you read.
At the beginning of the year you can set a goal to read a certain amount of books. You can update your progress as you read. For 2019, I have set a goal to read twenty books, one non-fiction and one fiction concurrently. So I will always have two books on the go.
Currently, my manuscript is about two thousand words long. When I sit down to write, I visualize what my characters are doing in the story. They are having real conversations with each other, in my head, as I write. The visual images just keep coming to me one after the other. When you find something you love to do time seems to fly by. For me it's real. I love writing.
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