(Note: For January, there is no Day 1. Took the day off to be with family, and to read.)

Today I set out with the following goals:

• Read the first 1/3 of Rayne Hall’s “Writing Fight Scenes“. I succeeded in this, and maybe read a bit more than I needed to. Areas covered today: the difference between entertaining and gritty fight scenes, and types of combat/weapons up to blunt weapons. There’s a good bit of knowledge in here, and many Youtube links to fight scenes to study.
• Keep working on the Wendigo Novel 1 outlining process, first with Michael A Stackpole’s “21 Days To a Novel“. I am currently on Day 17 and miscalculated how long it would take. I allotted an hour for it, and it will take anywhere from two to three. I plan to finish this up tomorrow.
• Keep working on the Wendigo Novel 1 outlining process, this time with the plan in Karen Wiesner’s “First Draft in 30 Days“. I’m using two different books because they each have a different focus. Stackpole’s book is focused primarily on characters and plot. Wiesner’s takes characters and plot and throws in setting, dialogue, subplotting, and a whole mess of other things that turn good novels into great novels. I recommend both books for those who have yet to get a novel written and want a place to start. I’d also recommend David Farland’s “Million Dollar Outlines” for this. Read it over last Spring and plan to re-read it sometime soon.
• Keep editing my “Ultimate Evil” short story. It’s basically the telling of a good versus evil story in the format of a wartime newspaper article. I didn’t get to do much direct editing on the story today. I spent a couple of hours researching old BBC articles from World War II to get an idea of the kind of structure that most of those articles were written in. My goal is to finish it tomorrow and get it send off by Sunday at the latest.
• Continue reading through Volume 28 of the Writer’s of the Future. I’ve read about 2/3 of it, so my goal is to finish the rest by the end of Sunday and start Volume 30 on Monday. I haven’t done this yet, but that’ll end up as bedtime reading.

And that’s it for the day. No actual fiction words written. Just a lot of planning that will hopefully make the writing part easy. Tomorrow I want to keep up with what’s listed here, but I also want to see if I can delve into my Writers of the Future entry (Yes, unfortunately I ended up missing the deadline with my tale. But, that just means it’ll be even more polished for next quarter).

Due to the holidays there is no Drafty Wednesday or WIPika Friday posts this week. That will pick up again next week! I’ll also be actively writing a new short story next week, so expect the work count to start jumping.

Blog Posts: 518
Planning and outlining: 1,880
Short Fiction: 0
Novel Fiction: 0
Salable words: 0

Total Fiction for Month: 0

Total Salable for Month: 0

Total Fiction for Challenge Year: 0

Total Salable for Challenge Year: 0