YA YA! I did it :-D Two announcements

Announcement #1 -- I finished the outline for Night Shift :-D I've never written one before but here it is, in its shiny imperfection.

There are 3 or 4 minor holes, to be honest. No, really, minor ones. I'm not sure HOW certain things happen but I know they do happen. I've dealt with that kind of issue before and my muse has always helped me work through it.

I'd like to say that forcing myself to sit down, sit still, and deal with plot problems head-on has been enlightening. I didn't think I could solve writing problems like that. But writing by the seat of my pants only gets me into trouble I can't get out of, so rather than keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different result, I did something different. I marched right up to those Gordian knots, cut through some and untied others.

Writing by "pantsing", for me, is like letting a young child run loose. The poor kid has no sense of priorities and no sense of direction. There's a feeling that everything has to be investigated because you might miss the BEST opportunity if you skip looking into even one treehole.

However, once I put side-blinders on and forced myself to focus only what was in front me, I was able to handle the uncertainties.

Ta-da! Outline!

Yes, it's imperfect. I'm not entirely sure how much I need to explain in the outline and how much I can leave open to be solved during chapter writing. Some points may be cliched or cheesy or weak or impractical or impossible, but they keep the framework of the story up for now. That leads me to --

Announcement #2 -- Someone has agreed to professionally critique my outline, and then my chapters :-D Art Edwards was co-founder and bassist for The Refreshments (no, not the Swedish band!). If you've seen the TV show King of the Hill, that's The Refreshment's music in the theme song. Art's writing regularly appears in online magazines on the topics of music and writing. He has self-published three books and is planning more. I took an online rock-n-roll writing course with him back in 2010 so I have a sense of what kind of teacher/guide he is.

However, Art is only able to do this in February 2015 because of his usually busy schedule. I need to get him my outline ASAP, then I'll have roughly two months to produce the manuscript. I did hit 51k in NaNo 2013 so I hope I can do a real manuscript in twice that amount of time.

Talk about pressure :-) Keep your fingers crossed for me, peeps. There won't be any time for fooling around on Facebook or watching cat videos on Youtube. I'll post updates as I can. Cheers!

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