Is getting organized the same as procrastination?

This status update is brought to you courtesy of @felt.buzz whose inquiry made me realize I hadn't been keeping my promises to post about my project.

To get where you want to go, you need to know where you're at

The above statement sums up where I've been on my project this week. As I've mentioned before, I have much of it written but there were holes that needed to be filled.

Initially, I wrote to fill the holes as I came across them. But in that process I found I was doing a lot more editing than I was writing. And there's no denying the parts I've written desperately need editing.

But that isn't what this month was about. I set my intention to finish the project - to get a complete first draft suitable for some serious editing and rewriting. As it is, I can't do that yet because of the holes.

It took most of the week for me to recognize I'd turned on the internal editor and not the writer. My solution to stop doing that was to get my story organized so I could see exactly what parts needed to be written - or expanded.

Enter the Scrivener import process.

Scrivener

If you haven't tried it, and you write a lot (or just like to be organized in what you write), look at Scrivener. I love it and I plan to write a whole post about it so this one won't say too much about it.

But my original draft, such as it was, I wrote in Microsoft Word. I wanted to move it to Scrivener before the month started but didn't get around to it. This week, I finally got around to it (after the aforementioned realization).

Here's a screenshot of the first book in Scrivener.

If you look closely, you'll see the chapter numbers are all messed up. I'll explain what happened in that future post on Scrivener. Just let's say it took some time to sort it all out once I loaded it in.

But if you focus on the labels and colors of the chapters, you'll see I have all but seven of them listed as "First Draft." That means they're written! I have only seven out of the 34 left to write (there are 34, not 16 though my crazy numbering says that).

Forward progress

After all that, I know exactly what it is I have to write. And I've added maybe another 500 words to my word count, coming in somewhere around 2,200. Not much considering I have a goal of 30,000 for the month.

But now I have it organized I don't think I need that many words. You see, I initially envisioned this story as a trilogy. What I've written so far is book 1. I have the remaining two books all blocked out scene by scene, but only about 5000 words or so written (if that really).

Before I laid it all out in Scrivener, I convinced myself it really wouldn't work as a trilogy so I was going to bang the whole thing out this month. That's what I was thinking when I picked my word count. But now I know two things:

1. I don't need 30,000 words to finish book 1. Maybe 15,000ish at most to complete the first draft.

2. It's going to take another 50,000 words to finish the story in book 2 - maybe more.

So while I can't say I've made a lot of progress writing, I have made a lot of progress!

Is getting organized the same as procrastination?

No.

Well, not this week.

A sincere thank you to @felt.buzz for asking me about my progress. I needed the prodding to post here on Steemit. And I'm excited to see him join Nanowrimo in November (looks around cautiously to see if he's listening... or if he's busy hacking the Steem blockchain to erase all records of our comment conversation).

Seriously, anyone can try and do Nanowrimo. It's intimidating, scary and fraught with self-doubt that's almost immeasurable. And so worth doing!

If you have any questions about this content, please let me know in the comments. Or better yet, click the banner to join my channel on Steemit Greeter's Guild!

Note: All images are mine or licensed from Adobe except where noted. The Steemit Greeter's Guild banners provided by @terminallyill.