Blog update

I can’t do this blog post without first saying: I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! J

My thesis project is moving along well. The more I read it and work on it, the more tweaks I do here and there for the section I’ve already written. I’ve also been working on the development of the different voices in my story. I’ve been trying to connect more with my characters to be able to write and allow the story to flow in the most organic way possible.

I’ve also received feedback from Dr. Zamora and have been working on her suggestions. I was very nervous to share my work at first but I am excited about the feedback I received. Some of her comments made me think about where in the story I should be adding scenes that describe more in depth the feelings and experiences my characters are going through to best satisfy the readers and make them connect with all the characters in the story. I am having some trouble locating and blending the new scenes with the existing story so what I decided to do for now was to write them in a separate section and have it ready to later blend it with the rest of the story.

For the different voices I have for my story, I decided to do the same. I am still at a drafting stage in my novel and feel like the best thing to do for now, when I get stock on deciding where to plug in the new voices, is to just write and worry about blending and connecting where appropriate later.

As I move forward, I will continue to draft my novel. I feel like I have done a lot thus far but still have more writing to go. 

Feeling a little disconnected…

I’ve continued working on my novel this week. Writing and revising. I’ve tried to not do so much revising or editing as I am writing because that usually slows me down or frustrates me. I found myself at time writing something and then immediately going back to edit it. When I caught myself doing that, I tried to continue writing unless it was completely necessary to adjust something. At times this week, I also felt a little disconnected from my novel. While my novel’s story line and my own life have never been exactly the same, I’ve always felt connected to my story and my characters. This week however, I have not felt the same. Let me give you an example of one of the times where I’ve felt disconnected. My character is not looking forward to the holidays at all. She is dreading the fact that she is driving back home for school’s winter break (she’s a college student) while I, on the other hand, am completely excited about the holidays almost being here. I have a ton of family coming over to celebrate together and I am just not feeling connected with my novel this week. I don’t think I was able to handle this disconnect very well this week as I felt pretty frustrated about it but hopefully I can manage to calm my excitement about the holidays and write about what my character is going through. For this coming week I am planning on writing different chapters of my novel where there are happy things going on and see how that works out. Experiencing this type of disconnect has been very weird to me because it hasn’t really happen to me in such way before. I have not always experience the same situations my characters have but I’ve managed to write and focus in their lives and not mine. We’ll see how things move along in the coming final weeks of the semester.  

Another Week of Writing... :)

This week I worked on my novel. I wrote for majority of the week and also revised as I was going and when I was done with certain sections. I worked on changing who was telling the story in several of the chapters I already had. I also jotted down notes about who will be telling the story in the chapters to come. My overall goal with that is to have several characters tell the story so that I could have the different points of view show in the overall novel. I also worked on the order in which I’ll have the chapters flow. I am having a little trouble with that. I keep changing the order and I am still not sure which order will work best for the story. I want to make sure that my audience becomes engaged with the novel and I think that if I have the right order I will be able to engage them. My novel is moving along and I hope it continues to move along without major issues.