Construction

Laineys Repetoire on Flickr

Well, piece by piece I'm working on a new design for this blog. So far I've added a new header at the top and mixed in some CSS to make things look neater and prettier. The photo in the header was taken by me with my old camera. It's a shot of the trees at Loch Raven, so yeah. Fonts are Garamond and Scriptina, two of my favorites.

Where credit is due

The background comes from Shabby Blogs, which has a lot of cute stuff. Unfortunately most of it is too cute for this blog, but it's still a highly recommended site! I also need to give a shout out to two other sites. I recently found Blog Bulk and it helped me put the divider lines in the sidebar. It looks like I'm going to be using a lot of the tutorials there. Pugly Pixel is an awesomely cute design site and it's currently one of my new favorite blogs. I used her navbar tutorials for creating the links under the header. Thanks a bunch to both of these sites!

In other construction news...

I finished with the outline for Loch Raven. Structured outlining is somewhat new to me. I used to just 'wing it' a lot when I wrote. I'd come up with an idea, jump right into chapter one and just plow on from there. 

The thing is, this usually results in one of two things happening. The most popular result is that I write an awesome beginning, flail about the middle and eventually give up. I have so many false starts under my belt, it's amazing. I've probably written War and Peace six times over with all of the abandoned projects I have lying around. One of these days I should get around to totaling up a word count of all the stories I've 'wasted' time writing. I'm sure it's a ridiculous amount. 

The other result of the 'full steam ahead' method is that the story can end up very disjointed. That's what happened with the first draft of Ghosts of Fallen Leaves. I would start to reference or set up story elements that would later be dropped, ignored or completely reversed by the end of the book. The various drafts since then have partly been motivated by a desire to make the beginning, middle and end of that book feel more connected. 

This whole sense of detachment is the main reason why I stopped writing Loch Raven in the first place. It wasn't that I couldn't come up with an ending. I just couldn't reconcile the darkness of the paranormal elements with the light, summery beginning that I'd written. The paranormal elements in the beginning are practically nonexistent, so I was having a great deal of trouble figuring out how to drop them in without it shattering the story beyond all believability. 

To outline, or not to outline? That is the question, folks.

I've since become a believer in outlines. Of course every writer has their own method and it's not like I refuse to write anything without having an outline first. While working on the rewrites of Ghosts, I actually got in the habit of doing outlines without even realizing it. I would make notes, either on my computer or during down time at work. Sometimes I'd write little bits of dialog, but mostly it was just rambling descriptions of chapters and scenes. 

It eventually occurred to me that this was actually a form of outlining. It helped me to keep track of the things that I needed to have happen whenever I sat down to write. Before starting this final rough draft though, I did outline the entire story so I had a mapped out version of the plot. It helped me keep the separate plot elements organized as well as focus on the 'beats' of the story, the little story arcs within the overall story arc. 

When book two became a foreseeable reality, I jumped right into writing  an outline before even starting a single word of chapter one. I actually have all of book two planned out, which is very strange for me. We'll see how well I stick to it, but it's nice starting a story with some sense of the beginning, middle and end for once. 

And now it's the same situation with Loch Raven. After looking over what I'd already written and brainstorming a new ending, I hammered out an outline over the past few days and now I'm ready to start  working on the story again. I'm very excited about where it's heading and I can't wait to share it with everyone!