Making Progress (sorta)

Happy spring, everyone! I know, it's been spring, technically, for weeks now, but I think this is the first full week it's FELT like it. It's been warm and sunny and beckoning me to hang outside. It's also been very "April" and rainy quite a few days.

In fact, last Tuesday Hubby and I got caught in a massive downpour out of nowhere. It was nice out. It was sunny. Then there was a thunder clap. Then came the hail. Then, within five minutes, the hail storm became a flash flood of rain. And... well... we still needed to get to our car from the post office. We were able to wait out the worst of the rain, but even when it let up a little I still had to navigate a flash-flooded parking lot, wading through about a quarter-inch of water. Also, since it was so warm and gorgeous out just ten minutes prior, I had my car windows down. So.... the car was pretty wet. It only got worse when we popped by a drive-thru for lunch. Just within the time it kept for me to give my order at the speakerbox, I got DRENCHED.

Lunch was yummy though, and I was able to lower all the windows once I was in my garage, so the car could air-dry.

It was a warm rain, and I had nowhere else to really go, and it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage to my new car, so I actually had a lot of fun in the ridiculousness of the flash-flooding downpour.

In truth, I was just happy it wasn't snow finally!

This week was also beautiful for me because I'm pretty positive I FINALLY figured out which order I want for those two scenes that were driving me insane! So... YAY!

As much as I do appreciate and value the suggestions my readers made, and as much as I wanted to follow their suggestion since I'm writing this story for them, I'm also mostly writing this story for me. I had to do what *I* thought was best, and that ended up being Hubby's suggestion. In part, it was because of what I discussed last week about wanting to avoid Adrien thinking Marinette was "just a fan". However, the main reason I went this direction was because of how I wrote the "he sees the pictures and realizes she's in love" scene. I love my "he hears about the bracelet and realizes she's in love" scene, and it will DEFINITELY be bonus content at some point. However, the "Pictures Love Reveal" scene just had more.... punch to it, I think. Plus, it made more sense for a key bit of dialog to be included post-love reveal than it did for "we're just really good friends" or to delay it for a later chapter.

So, I think I have the timeline as follows:
Chat's been visiting for a few nights already, and they have a sort of rhythm to his visits. The latest Gabriel clothing line will launch the next day, which means Gabe will be available to meet with Marinette in the near future. She's nervous about the meet up, and wishes she still had her lucky charm bracelet since it always brought her comfort and confidence. Longing for her trinket, she starts drawing it in her sketchpad. Chat sees the sketch during his nightly visit, and that leads into her telling him about the significance of the bracelet and how she gave it to Adrien. He encourages her, and lets her know that a) she should ask for the trinket back if it means that much to her, but also b) she doesn't need it since she's so talented.

The following Monday - so, three days later - Marinette does have her meet-up with Gabriel, which also turns into a hang with Adrien to play a new video game. Things are still goofy between the duo, and she was still awkward with Gabriel, but all-in-all it was a good experience. As a thank you to Chat Noir for the encouragement, she makes him callisons: almond-shaped gummy candies. Chat Noir startles her, and when she throws the tray of treats in the air in surprise, they rain down on him, making his costume and hair tacky in the honey-like frosting. Marinette, frazzled, offers for Chat Noir to clean up at the sink in her room, not even thinking that it's not "visitor ready". Chat sees the pictures of Adrien, and the love confession comes from that. He then suggests she try confessing to Adrien, and offers to help her build up the confidence to do so. He even mentions that Adrien would be an idiot to not return her feelings. This last bit is crucial for the climax of the story.

Okay, so that spoiler box got a lot larger than I originally intended! Long and short, I think I have the... er... middle of my middle? figured out.

I also finally surpassed 5000 words written this month for Camp NaNo. So there's that...

Now to come up with a transition from the first act of the story into Act II. Then a lead-in to the scenes I've been battling over all month. And then a transition again from Act II to Act II, as well as a proper lead-in to that Act III climax.

I would conservatively estimate that I have... about 80% of Act I figured out, maybe 50% of Act II, and... we'll go with 50% of Act III? That's about 60% of the entire story done...

So... yay for feeling like I have just shy of two-thirds of the story sorted out? I have less than that actually written, but at least I kinda-sorta know where I'm going with it?

And it only kept me about 9 months to do it.

NuaNia Facebook sticker
by PRANEAT

I may get this story done by August....

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by Birdman, Inc.

It might help if I get back into my time audits after slacking on them for the better part of a month. I never remember to take the planner out of my work bag when I'm home post-work or have a day off. Then, when I did remember to pull the planner, last week, I forgot to put it back IN the bag to bring with me to work again... it became a downward spiral from there.

Sure, I've been writing daily. And, yes, my word counts haven't been that great, but that's only because I've been mostly editing existing scenes. Still... my word count and progress on this project mostly suck because I slack off once I'm home.

So, time audits! I just need to do these forever, I guess. They're tedious, especially when I'm too busy to stop even for a couple seconds to write how long it kept me to do a certain task. But, I'm just not habitually structured enough without them. Too frequently I look back at my day and go "what did I even do?"

I have the start of my new calendar set. I just need to take the time to print off the pages I need. It will be a LOT of pages and a LOT of ink, and I'm not entirely sure the library printers can print double sided, so I may have to go to the local printer. Which means needing money as well.

I thought I could save time, energy, paper, and money by just buying a new planner from Walmart or something. While it was a headache to try to even FIND my planner last summer, I guess April is still early enough in the year that the hourly planners are still around. However, they have the same issue my current one has.

Namely, that it only covers about 10 or 12 hours of the day, rarely covers the evenings, which is when I most need to track my time, and Saturday and Sunday are combined into one column, which means I can't fully track even half my day when it's not a weekday.

Which means I'm still aiming to just print my own.

This is a reminder of what is out on the market: the hourly planner I currently own, and what the potential replacements all more-or-less look like. It's decent. It's done what I needed it to do, for the most part. It starts at 7am and goes until 9pm. It's a decent amount of day, stretching 14hrs, which is the most I've seen in any planner. It also covers 7am until 5:45pm on Saturday, which is again the most I've seen dedicated to a Saturday in these types of planners.

All-in-all, this was a lovely planner, and if I had to purchase a replacement, I'd go with this brand again.

Not only is the planner itself made from recycled paper,
but each page gives you a conservation tip.

It truly is a great product, and I strongly suggest anyone looking for an hourly day planner for any normal reason to pick this brand up.

For me, though? As I mentioned, I needed to go a different route.

These are my prototype pages, but I'm fairly happy with them. I don't have the space to have the hours numbered down each column like the At-A-Glance pages, and I may take away from the "Notes" section on the far end in order to put the hours on that side as well; bookending the week. However, I haven't quite decided yet if that's what I want to do.

The big thing for me, though, is how I adjusted the times. I'm a bum who rarely does anything significant prior to 8am, so I had my days start then, but I also wanted to leave that opening block for when I do get my butt out of bed at a decent hour. It's also a nice spot for me to mark birthdays, anniversaries, or national holidays. I'm also pretty active at least until 11pm, so I wanted to extend the hours in the day I can record. I figured anything I do post 11pm I can note in that block. With any luck, those adjustments will work well for me.

The only new snaffu is the size. Clearly I'm now using a full 11in sheet of paper per page, which is significantly larger than my current planner.

I needed to finish up 2019 since my current planner ends in June, and it actually amused me that I lucked into orange colored taps for both October 2019 and October 2020. I do still need to create the monthly calendar pages to start each month off. That way I can still record my smilies of writing days. I may even create a coding system to record my writing days, exercising ones, and even my cleaning days, because as of right now I only clean on my days off, and it's overwhelming to stockpile things like dishes, folding laundry, vacuuming, etc.

The larger pages actually allowed me to keep the individual log spots fairly similar in size, even with the extra hours that I'm trying to record. The only major issue was that I needed to thin out each column in order to fit everything properly. Otherwise I would need to either divide Thursday across both sides of the binder - which isn't helpful or practical at all - or I would have to again combine Saturday and Sunday in order to fit all 7 days across the two pages.

I think I can handle the slightly thinner columns. I'll just have to be more concise or write smaller.

In truth, once you take out the portion of each column where the hour is listed,
the columns aren't THAT different in size.
Although, I may try to number each line like At-A-Glance does.

The only other issue I might have with my version of the planner is that with a 3-ring binder, I won't be able to fold it onto itself like I can with the At-A-Glance planner. Unless I pay for it to be professionally printed and bound in a spiral cover like the purchasable planner, I won't be able to condense the planner to it's "closed" size while still working on it.

Oh well, I can survive without that feature, I'm sure. Worse comes to worst, I can pop the page I'm working on out of the binder, fill it in throughout the day, and then pop it back into the binder once I'm done with my recordings. The other hindrance is the larger size of the binder, especially since it's thicker and hardcover. It's not as bendable as my current planner, and so it won't fit quite the same in my work bag. The existing planner fits nicely inside a little side-pocket within my bag. A side-pocket that barely holds anything else. It's easy enough, though to shift my Miraculous Ladybug notebook to that pocket, and that should leave enough space in the main pocket for the planner binder to tuck behind my netbook.

This should work. Part of me wants to start using this new calendar now. However, that would mean I ended up wasting even MORE of my existing planner, which wasn't utilized nearly as much as I would have liked, AND I would waste more paper and ink printing off at least two more months of weekly calendar sheets.

So, I will have to patiently wait until July to start using this new planner I doctored. In the meantime, I'll keep on tweaking until I'm 100% satisfied with the layout and formatting. Maybe I'll also print off a few pages at a time to build up the planner before I need it. That way I don't need all of that money all at once. I could trickle it.

But back to my actual writing!

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by Ghostbot

As I mentioned at the top of the post, I'm pretty confident I FINALLY managed to figure out my scene order... for those two scenes. The rest of the story, though????

At least, now that I have those two scenes locked in with regards to their order, I am also able to figure out the surrounding scenes. So I now think I have a lead-in to the one scene, and I know I have a follow-up chapter for the second scene. The only snag there, though, is that my outline for that follow-up chapter is fairly similar to the third chapter of the story. So I need to figure out how the chapters are different, and if there's enough character growth for them to feel like foils of each other. Or... should I completely change one of the two chapters?

WHOO! ANOTHER DUAL SCENE DILEMMA!

Just what I needed....


At least I'm learning about editing and story structure... right? Perhaps once I'm done with this problem child of a story I'll have enough skill growth to finally tackle "Please, Let Me Explain" again, and actually have it thinned out enough that Ronoxym won't feel overwhelmed anymore. Because I really do want to finish that story off properly. I also need to get back to editing the fight scene between Devon and Trish - as well as finally name that story - so I can post that one-shot I wrote a few summers ago.

My poor girls have been abandoned! Sorry, ladies!

Trish, Willow, and Lia
Designs doctored from ChaZie doll makers

Side note. I used to go to DollzMania.com to make these dolls of my characters, since I'm trash at drawing. However, the site has since closed down. I was able to find some of ChaZie's doll makers up on other sites, but barely even a third of the ones I know they made, and virtually none of the ones I had used to create those three above. If anyone knows where ChaZie is now, or where to find the full collection of doll makers, please let me know. Thanks.

As for the rest of today? Well, DFL from writing group invited me to go watch a short film entitled "10 Mistakes Writers Make", so perhaps I'll have some new advice for everyone next week. At the very least, maybe it will help me figure out this darn fanfic. Writing group is tonight as well, so I'm sure DFL and I will discuss what we learned with the group. I'll just have to figure out if I want to read more disconnected bits of "One and the Same" tonight, since that's what I'm actively working on, or if I want to continue reading "Prescription for Love" since that's the last continued work I read for them.

We'll see.

Until next week, enjoy the fine weather, my friends. Also... happy belated Earth Day, which was yesterday, and happy early Arbor Day, which is Friday.

It's a good week to be a tree.

Yes, I did indeed watch the 2012 "The Lorax" film yesterday...