In the midst of pre­par­ing my daugh­ter to go to Africa this sum­mer I haven’t kept updat­ing as much as I should, but I have been mak­ing baby steps of progress.

Lesson 4 is done, Lesson 5 well into. This one is bring­ing each scene down to a “VS” state­ment, ie Main Character’s Mandate VS Her fear of Heights. This brings the scene con­flict into sharp relief, we then describe what that basic con­flict looks like and add Why It Matters.

It is harder and harder to find writers that I enjoy after learn­ing these things — but the ones I do enjoy are SO wonderful!

Hopefully I will be one of those writers before too long.

Today I did sig­ni­fic­ant work on Shurley English and com­pleted Lesson Four in HTRYN.

The English is very work-​intensive, although it’s excit­ing to be filling gaps in my basic edu­ca­tion. I’m not sure I should be pour­ing my lim­ited brain-​cells into that first thing on a Monday though, before get­ting to HTRYN. We’ll try doing it the other way around tomorrow.

Recovering from a week away for a fam­ily wed­ding, I pulled out Lesson Four again and spent some time writ­ing a new “one sen­tence sum­mary” of my first Nanonovel, Gift of the Ancients.

I had a one sen­tence sum­mary for the story before I wrote it, but Holly Lisle’s way of going about it is dif­fer­ent than Randy Ingermanson’s (I used his Snowflake method to plan the novel in the last ten days of October 2007). As usual, at first I res­isted chan­ging a pre-​learned method, but I have to say I’m very pleased with the res­ults. The new sum­mary brings the story to life bet­ter. As I work on more things in com­ing weeks some things in the sen­tence may change, but over­all I think we have a winner.

The pur­pose of a one sen­tence sum­mary is a mar­ket­ing tool. It’s a fast but com­plete response to the ques­tion “So what is your book about?” and is your first line of attack in try­ing to interest an editor. It’s import­ant, and not easy to do. My ori­ginal one sen­tence was:

Forbidden friends must reach and activ­ate an ancient weapon to save their land from inva­sion.

Ingermanson recom­mends a 15 – 17 word limit to keep your sound-​bite short. It’s accur­ate, but doesn’t hook the way I wanted it to.

In How To Revise Your Novel, Holly Lisle allows for 30 words, but advises includ­ing your Protag, Antag, Plot, Setting and Twist and breaks down just how to do it. The new sen­tence is:

A strong-​willed trouble­maker secretly dis­cov­ers Ancient tech­no­logy and must use it to pro­tect low-​tech Ympyra from power­ful invaders, but an enemy becomes a friend and noth­ing works out like she thought.

The twist needs some work, but this is by far the stronger sen­tence. Anyone agree?

Today I fin­ished Lesson Three, which just took more brain power than was avail­able for me to fin­ish it quickly. I’ve read through Lesson Four and I’m excited to get to work on it as well.

Besides the How To Revise Your Novel course, to aid my writ­ing I am also doing, with my homeschool­ing son, Shurley English Grade Seven, which prom­ises that I will ‘fear no gram­mar’ upon completion.

This course requires some of my lim­ited resources as well, and may slow my pro­gress through HTRYN, but the time is right as I can teach two of us at once.

A week of travel begins for me tomor­row with little oppor­tun­ity for writ­ing, so updates will likely cease until the last week of May, when I can get back to proper work.

Almost made it to the end of Lesson Three, but life intruded. Will fin­ish up tomor­row and begin Lesson Four on Monday.

Scene cards went well today, I think I’m get­ting the hang of it. The ‘sequels’ (see Techniques of the Selling Writer) are a little harder to handle, but I’m get­ting some kind of a grip on them.

It’s encour­aging to see the work still pro­gress­ing even as I have low per­sonal resources this week. Every step mat­ters, even the small ones.

Almost a quarter of the way through Lesson Three, assign­ing each scene (defined as when some­thing sig­ni­fic­ant changes) a sen­tence describ­ing all the essen­tial ele­ments of the scene, or not­ing miss­ing elements.

I have a hard time going from big-​picture to small-​picture in terms of how sig­ni­fic­ant things are. The first quarter intro­duces so many things, and while there are some dra­matic twists to get the story going, other things are less obvi­ous but still important.

I am hop­ing it will go easier tomor­row, where a lot more plot action takes place.

All caught up with my pages, look­ing for­ward to com­plet­ing this les­son tomorrow!

Doing well on the Lesson 2 work­sheets des­pite the slow start yesterday.

I’m catch­ing on to the concept of look­ing for char­ac­ters and items that are intro­duced for the first time, and mark­ing them accord­ingly. It’s pos­sible to skim quite a lot this way, and I’m encour­aged by how many times the story pulls me in dur­ing scenes I could be passing over.

Today I covered less ground in my manu­script than I would have liked, get­ting through 30 pages instead of 65. I’m happy with the qual­ity of work, though.

I spent some time on the HTRYN for­ums, get­ting a bet­ter idea of how to pro­ceed which was time well spent. I also got through most of my ‘Main Character’ work­sheets, as so many of them appear in the first few chapters. These are much more time con­sum­ing than the other work­sheets, which track the intro­duc­tion of all items and char­ac­ters in the story.

Sound like a lot of work? It is. But since I know what I’m look­ing for, the pages go by at a good rate.

I will look at the for­ums some more tomor­row, then see how far I can get. Still optim­istic about fin­ish­ing by Friday.