by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
This weekend, I paused my writing on the novel to sketch out the scene summaries of the last few chapters of the first half of the novel. Now, however, I have to get back up to speed with the mental “float” of what’s going on with the novel at the moment.
Given how ambitious this novel is, that’s probably the most difficult part of writing it — “canon management.” I guess I could use a spreadsheet to figure out the float, but the float is so abstract and in flux right now that I actually have to finish the first draft before I can do that.
I may — may — break down and access to one of the various software programs available to manage development of your novel. But the system I have figured out with Google Docs is extremely flexible and I’m afraid buying such software would be too constraining for a first draft.
Maybe for the second draft when things are far more set in stone. But for the time being, I think I’m going to keep things in my mind as much as possible then between the first and second drafts do a lot of writing to make canon management of the second draft a lot easier.
The key thing is to just keep going forward and finish a first draft of some sort, any sort, so I can use that as the basis of a much, much better second draft that I will feel comfortable showing other people so they can be beta readers.
