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@noah-cochran

Hey Rose, I’m doing alright. The weather is frigid in Missouri, so I assume that the Netherlands is covered in ice.   School started, and college starts soon, so I solemnly await busyness.

How about you?
Pretty good! We had a couple really icy days already, but now we’ve returned to the natural Dutch state. Mud. Lots of it. Rain and clouds every day, I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun XD

School starts tomorrow for me. Yeah, looking forward to that. Absolutely.

Four of my other beta readers have given me feedback, and the other four may or may not finish within the next few decades.
Five beta-readers is quite a lot already though! I hope the others finish one day XD

How are you finding the feedback? Are you spotting any patterns or is everyone violently disagreeing? XD

Book one of the series is progressing nicely, but I occasionally hit a day where my brain’s creative writing skills are quite dead (like today for instance). One of my side characters’ personality swings more than a pendulum, and when it’s not, they’re quite flat. But otherwise, I think the characters are working well (in my head anyway).
Oh, I know those days, they’re positively painful and exceptionally frustrating. I know those characters too, those who just won’t cooperate no matter what you do XD And then you have them finally figured out and then have to go back and rewrite some of it, which is always fun. I’ve had characters do complete 180 turns and then I had to rewrite everything about them.

How is your finale going? How far are you through it? What’s your average word count goal for each week day?
Going pretty well! I’m occasionally struggling but having a great time nevertheless! I’m almost 30k in, but my characters fell out of sync so one POV is already into the second act and the other is just breaking into two now. He’s just slower throughout the entire first half, so at least I have the other POV where something is happening.

I set my goal at 1300 words a day, which is a pretty small goal, I can finish it in about an hour. I can usually do more, but I purposefully made my goal small because otherwise I get overwhelmed before I even begin writing. Now I can hit my goal quickly and that usually encourages me to keep going.

And even if I only write that much each day I’ll still finish in three months, which is faster than anything I’ve written so far.

My character arcs instantly went out of whack XD It always happens, but it isn’t really an issue. I usually pick an angle from which to approach the theme and then it doesn’t work out so I just switch perspectives on the lie a bit and go from there.

So, the character arcs are usually just slightly to the left of what I planned, but usually turn out more interesting for it.

It means I’ll have more polishing to do in the second draft but that’s okay too, I’m just trying to get it written.

I have been participating in Crazy Writing Week this week, which has been absolute chaos but very productive. CWW is a challenge where everyone is assigned to a team and it’s a competition which team can get the most words and the most hours in a week.

It’s run by Josiah from here and Brett Harris from Do Hard Things and a couple other Christian authors.

There are over 500 writers who have written more than 1000 words and the total word count for both teams is about 3 million words. (If you think of it as 30 full novels that really puts it into perspective)

I’m a shockingly competitive person so nothing motivates me more and I usually go way overboard in some attempt to win the race all by myself. Last August, I wrote 15k. This week, I’ve already written 20k and I have two days left. (I’m trying to see if I can somehow hit 30k, just for funsies XD)

I’m absolutely doing it to horrify @this-is-not-an-alien and for no other reason XD

I like it because it pushes me past any hard sections *cough* the entire first act *cough* and it builds up enough momentum that I can keep going. No way I’ll be able to keep that up when school starts but at least I’m that much further ahead!

So, yeah, we’ll see how that goes!

I finished reading the second book a couple weeks ago, which was fun but somewhat cringy at any given point in time because it’s my old writing and ugh XD

It’s hilarious but you could see the exact chapter where I started reading The Book Thief for the first time because my prose noticeably changes XD

I also got someone else who is going to start beta-reading the first book in a few more weeks, which is absolutely terrifying, in a good way XD

Are you finding writing a second book easier than your first? I know it was exponentially easier for me. Is there anything that has surprised you about it so far?