One Scene at a Time

With everything else involved in being a publishing do-it-yourself-er...expanding a germ of an idea into a complete novel, getting it down on paper, getting it ready for prime time, maintaining a website (actually two, for Bettye Griffin and Bunderful Books, respectively, etc.), making book trailers (I still haven't done a revised one for If These Walls Could Talk, which was re-released two weeks ago), maintaining a Facebook presence, and the rest, it's hard to carve out time to simply write, which is the favorite activity that got me into this in the first place. Add that to the fact that I balance three projects simultaneously...doing ruthless red pen pre-publication edits on one and writing the others, and it becomes even more of a challenge.

Obviously, I do this in small steps. I'll devote a morning to edits, an evening to writing my story with the wounded hero, and the next day, worn out by that hero's angst, I'll start writing my story with a charming rogue of a hero and his pursuit of the weakening heroine, and on and on. I find myself breaking it down into scenes; while my husband is snoring I'll be thinking about the next scene I want to do. And I rarely write in chronological order; I believe in writing the scene that I'm feeling the most (I synopsize my storylines before I write, so it's not as though I don't know what happens next).

With this piecemeal approach to novel writing and focus on scenes, I was delighted to learn about a software package that allows writers to create novels one scene at a time, then link the scenes in the order they want and import it to a dedicated word processor. The program is free as the designers are working out the kinks in preparation in putting it for sale (at which time the free download will be discontinued) later this year.

If you're a piecemeal writer, you might want to give it a look. Here's the link.