Archive for January 31st, 2006

1/30/06: Outlining

Word count: 3274 | Since last entry: 414

Tonight’s wordcount is a complete but rather sketchy outline of the current story, trying to work in all the key points from this weekend’s plot and character notes. Many missing pieces still. What is the main character’s job on board ship? Need to find an org chart for the Pioneer or Voyager mission to get names of scientific specialties… would also probably be good to find and re-read the daily logs from the International Space Station, which I saw posted on the web some years ago.

Outlining at this point feels rather like… cheating? Wasting time? I feel I should be writing, i.e. producing salable words, in my limited writing time. But I know that this story’s bigger than my usual and needs some planning and special attention if it’s going to work.

I am envious of people who produce 1000-2000 words per day on a regular basis (though I know that many of them don’t have day jobs).