Story Milestone - Lightbearers, and things going slowly · 5:39pm Jul 23rd, 2017
I finally have the notes and timeline finished on Lightbearers. Completely and totally.
I am finally finished with all the preliminary stuff, and have started on the first draft. Things are really kicking into gear now; at this rate, I should have the first draft finished and ready for editing within another year or year and a half. 
I hope I can scrape up the time and motivation to get it done sooner than that, 'though. My job has been so busy, I've hardly had time to work on anything. I still have an editing commitment to work on, and review commitments to get caught up on.; but between job and family responsibilities, I barely have time to just sit and read anymore, let alone do any serious work on my hobbies. Well, except drinking, I do a lot of that.
Always wondered - what do your notes look like?
I mean, really, what goes into the notes for a big work of fiction?
I can't speak to anyone else's process, but my notes vary a bit. Mostly, they're a collection of scenes that sort of popped into my head. I tend to write either entire scenes, short pieces of a scene, bits of dialog, or brief summaries of how I want a particular scene or passage to work.
With most of my work, I'll take those and expand on them as I write the actual story. Most of the time I don't bother with anything more than that.
With Lighbearers, due to the anachronic structure and shifting narrative, I've included a few steps that I don't normally use. First, I expanded the scenes in far more detail than I normally use prior to writing the first draft, almost enough for the draft itself, but not quite, the language is more simple and rudimentary than I'll be using for the actual story draft. Second, I used an outline to keep track of the various scenes and bits, helping keep them organized so I know what is where. Given that my notes alone are over 300 narrow-margin GDoc pages, that was critical to keeping track of everything. Third, I created a linear timeline of my notes to ensure that everything fits, that it has a coherent flow to the story, and that everything makes sense (I know, what fun is there in making sense?) before assembling the full non-linear narrative.
Now that that's done, I'm assembling those bits into more or less the order I want them to come up in the story, expanding and improving the bits, and adding the linking narration. A rather complicated process, but it's a rather complicated story.
Not too dissimilar from what I do, then.
4612245
Probably not.