Stats and Gaiman

Well, I’ve had a pretty successful day as far as Blog Stats goes, at least on the surface. I’ve already had 150+ visits today, which is about 3 times my normal. I wish it was due to something brilliant I wrote or something like that. Instead, it’s due to 114 views for the post I made a few years ago about the “Death of Garfield“. This post has been a constant hit source for me, which I find amusing. Posts like this usually don’t translate into return visitors. 150+ visits today and 1 comment. Oh well.

I have added some links to my writing on the “Death of Garfield” post, just in case someone gets curious.

Oh, make sure to stop by Neil Gaiman’s Journal, as he has been linking to a bunch of Stardust movie related stuff. Also on his site is the first chapter of the audio version of Stardust, read by Gaiman himself: link to mp3 of chapter 1 of Stardust.

A while back he said that his tagline for the movie would’ve been “Stardust. It’s not a sequel to anything.” I like that.

My Novel Strategy

Well, I am again embarking on the solitary mission of writing a novel, having again abandoned the one I was working on. I truly am excited about my new idea, however, and have already filled a few notebook pages and a few post it notes of story ideas. For those of you who are interested, I’m taking my entry for the contest at The Clarity of Night and am attempting to expand it into a novel, or novella, or short story, or whatever it becomes. As always, I feel excitement and hope at the beginning of this project. Hopefully this time it won’t end in apathy.

Anyhow, this post isn’t meant to be about the past, but rather the future. I have a new strategy I’m going to try out, and I think it can work. I know I don’t have it in me to make any type of outline for this novel, because number 1, making an outline isn’t fun, and number 2, I don’t think my creative process works like that. I do need some type of planning phase, though, so here is my idea: I’m going to write a very brief synopsis of what happens in my novel.

Here is a generic example (part of this example will be my real synopsis, the rest is just for illustration purposes):

The hero is bound to a tree for an unknown time, having been kept alive by a stranger who when the sun cuts through the trees, frees the hero and tells him he is to be king. The hero is nursed back to heath by the stranger, and learns that blah blah blah…

Anyhow you get the idea. What I hope to accomplish here is not to let my words get in the way (descriptions, character names, place names, grammar, punctuation, but to flesh out the whole story in vague terms so I know where it is going.  This will also give me an idea of scenes and chapters, or basically an “outline” of my story without having to create an outline.

This might not be entirely my idea, it could’ve been kicking around in my head from all the novel writing advice I’ve read over the years.  However, I really think this is going to work for me, and I’m excited, which is a good thing.

What do you all think?