Trying to get organised

Since my last post, I've mostly been preparing and revising teaching material for my classes, but I have also been making more of a concentrated effort to be creative. The first thing I did was block out time in my calendar each week, for art and for writing. One of the biggest challenges I had with writing was finding time to do it, as whenever a pocket of spare time presented itself to me, I'd always find an excuse or something else to do instead of writing. I didn't do a lot of writing this morning as I was recovering from yesterday's 8am class start time (I am decidedly not a morning person), but in the afternoon I have dug up a spreadsheet I started making several years ago with the structures and word counts for my WIP.

About a third of my chapters for that novella are complete or close to complete (pending any revisions once I get feedback on the drafts), another third are about half done and the final third have little to nothing written for them. Having numbers and charts like this helps me visualise progress - I found a similar spreadsheet useful for keeping track of progress on my PhD thesis chapters - and also see what needs to be done next. Between my word count totals and my chapter outlines, I'm hoping it will help me refamiliarise myself with my manuscript so I can start working on it again. After being forced to discontinue my PhD for almost 4 years, it took me a good 6-12 months to immerse myself in my research again and get to a point where I could move forward, but since I'm more interested in my novel than I was in that research project, I hope it won't take that long with my creative writing.

I've also been going over my outline for the chapters as well as the overall word counts. For the few chapters I've finished or almost finished (at the start and end of the book, with a few in the middle), I'm mostly happy with the contents, though there are still a few placeholder notes I wrote to myself more than a decade ago pointing out things that needed to be expanded or corrected but which I never got around to doing. But for the chapters that have almost nothing written in them, going back over the outline now reminds me why they have almost nothing written: because the outline for those chapters is either vague or contains events or plot points that are based on characters doing things Because The Author Needs Them To rather than because the character would logically or plausibly behave that way.

While I can continue refining the chapters that already have some substance, I think I am going to need to work out these plot kinks before I can make much progress on writing new material.