This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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No email address required.
Notes -
Last Friday I read the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which I completed at the very end of May and didn't look at for six weeks.
It's... decent. The story is coherent and I think the characters are believable. Right now, I think the main thing that's holding it back is pacing. It's broken up into five acts: I think the first, fourth and fifth are quite strong and very readable, whereas the second act is a little slow, and the third needs to be edited quite heavily to add in a new "hook" that only occurred to me after completing the first draft. Additionally, at the end of the fourth act and the start of the fifth act there are three very long chapters back to back at which the pace grinds to a halt, which I need to cut down very dramatically so the pacing doesn't flag too much.
On Sunday I began work on the second draft, chopping down the first with a goal of removing (per Stephen King's writing advice) at least ten per cent of the total word count. This has not been challenging at all: by the time I finished work on Sunday, the combined word count of the first and second acts was already 24% shorter than the equivalent word count in the first draft (I even cut an entire chapter from the second act I didn't think added much). I've been really enjoying the process. Once I've finished cutting stuff out, I'm going to add in some ideas I had since completing the first draft, again with the goal of my second draft being no longer than 90% of the first draft's word count (preferably shorter). Then and only then will I let someone other than me look at it.
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