Starting on November 9th, I have not missed a day. I also haven’t come close to the my daily target for November, either.

I want to say it was on the ninth–or possibly the day before–that the final half of The Fall of Skullkeep clicked into place. Don’t worry; I jotted down notes for it.

The process that led to publishing Awakening was a modified version of The Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson, and I continued to use that modified method all the way up through either …Till It’s Over! or Haven Ascendant. I’m not going to get into the whys and wherefores of it here, but basically, it’s the Plantsing method. If Outliners are Plotters and Discoverers (no defined plan or guide, just take off writing) are Pantsers, then the Snowflake Method sits almost squarely in the middle, hence me calling it ‘Plantsing.’

Now, all that being said… if you looked at the notes I wrote for It Ain’t Over…, you’d see that the published story diverged (in some places, quite a bit) from the notes I developed using my modified Snowflake Method. I was already drifting toward Pantsing or Discovery writing (as Joanna Penn likes to call it) or Writing Into The Dark (as Dean Wesley Smith calls it).

I cannot think of any recent published stories that had notes like I used to do. Often, I go into it with a concept or idea. For example, the idea that led to Smilodon was that I wanted to write about a guy who could turn into a sabertooth cat. That’s it. That was the only guiding thought in my mind when I sat down to write it. Everything else is my interpretation of (or reaction to) modern shifter fiction… in the moment I was writing it.

Now… why did I write all this in what was supposed to be an update on my Q4 Challenge progress?

By the end of the day on the 9th, I had a page and change of notes on how I was going to get from where I currently was in The Fall of Skullkeep to the climax of the story.

Which also meant that it was difficult to focus on rounding out my day on the story I’d started it with.

Daily Word Count: 2,603
Weekly Word Count: 8,802
Remaining Words to 25,000: 16,198