Today was the first day I dug into the second draft of Counting Stars and so far it’s working for me. I wrote five scenes and 4,005 words. This brings my total word count to 24,750. If I can write 2500 words for the next nine days, I’ll be eligible to “win” for the month. My hope is to write 5 scenes a day and not worry so much about the word count — if I can manage that, then the story will be finished which is what I really wanted for this month.

I said in the last post that I had changed the story structure from a typical novel to my short story format of First Do No Harm, Shadows, If I Don’t Try With You, etc., and I wanted to expand on what that means.

These are the stories I write with scene numbers. I can’t remember why I started writing that way, only that I did it with First Do No Harm in 2007.

I approach those scenes slightly differently — they’re usually more brief (less than a thousand words) and the story ends up being more like snippets from a life than a full-fledged story. These are good for plots that don’t lend themselves either to a full All We Are story or even a short story like Other People’s Truths. It also takes pressure off me because I don’t do a lot of world building in those stories. I jump into a timeline, don’t change much, etc.

I’m feeling good about this change. I hope you guys feel good about it, too.