Say Nope to the Trope is going to be a fun project for me to work on alongside the rest of my writing. I’m intending to balance creating a polished project but also just having fun with it and using it as a way to get comfortable with sharing my writing.

Preparation Period Summary: More Research than I Remember

I’ve been reviewing the notes I already have for the Say Nope to the Trope series and there is way more of it than I remember. A testament to my reading of the genre! The notes are all from early 2024 and I have definitely read more since then so it will be interesting to see that expand as I go. In my original notes, I have 30. I haven’t finished all of them, and I’m not still reading all of them, but they showed me enough of the genre that I took notes to see the commonality of tropes and how they’re implemented.

Where am I at in the preparation phase?

For May, the focus was on the structure and plot. I wanted a clear outline of the structure and plot progression of the entire series so that it would make planning and plotting out each volume. I started doing that in April and spent May making sure the foundational plot threads were sown.

The biggest challenge for me will likely be my underestimation of my ability to pack plot into small pieces of writing. I’ve made some changes to the word count expectations in the planner as way to work with this and have continued to try and reframe my expectations to myself about writing smaller and easily digestible pieces of writing for the project but you never really know how something will go until you’re doing it!

I already had two tentative structures and timelines prepared for Say Nope to the Trope as a whole series and so I worked on translating those into one for this project. I have a scene-by-scene, beat-by-beat, guide for volume 1 and we’ll see how well that works out for me.

Wrtivember Conclusion

I’m still writing Blade’s Gauntlet. Cramming a single draft into a month seemed doable at first but combined with life, the deadline just ran away from me. I wrote 43,000 words in about five days and then spent the rest of the month dripping in only another 20,000 in the last three weeks. I’m still 30,000 words from my goal word count for the project and so will be planning some writing focus days throughout June, dotted around my serial writing, to get that first draft completed before prepuary in July.

I think what happened is I burned myself out trying to force myself to focus on one writing project. How I wish I could do that but it seems like my brain needs to be allowed to bounce between a few projects so the excitement feels fresh. Or maybe I really just need to go and get tested/diagnosed.

Happy writing!