Day 11: Relying on God for help

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My email took very little time today, but I did have to wrestle a bit with Safari and Adobe.com to get my password changed.

I still have a few house chores to do, but then I’ll be continuing to work on Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis) on volume 8 of my series (which used to be volumes 8/9 before I combined them). Looking over my diary entry yesterday, I realize that as I progress through this series and my original plots change, the later volumes are taking longer to plot because I have to redo Snowflake step 2 (1-paragraph summary) to accommodate for the changed plots, so I shouldn’t be so frustrated that the plotting is taking longer than I’d like.

However, I would still like to work faster. In my quiet time with God today, I realized that I don’t depend on God enough when I’m doing work like this. I pray for help when I’m not feeling well physically, or when I’m rushing to meet a deadline, but when figuring out plotting problems I don’t even think to ask God for help. And why wouldn’t He help me? He’s the one who gave me the idea for this series and put it on my heart to go into self-publishing so that I could have my stories translated into Japanese.

So today I’m going to try to pray more as I’m working. I’m pretty sure God will show up and give me a little boost. :)

***

I was able to finish Snowflake step 4 on volume 8 relatively quickly today, and so I continued on to volume 9. But in looking at the plot, I again wondered it I should combine volumes 9 and 10, or maybe even change volumes 9, 10, and 11 into two volumes instead of three.

So I ended up doing some more high-level plotting on those three volumes today, revising the Snowflake step 2 I did for each of them, trying to see if the plot I had was too thin for a complete volume or not.

I finished revising Snowflake step 2 for volume 9, and I ended up going into a little too much detail and wrote out Snowflake step 4, but it’s not as detailed as the Snowflake step 4 of my other volumes. I realized that the Snowflake step 2 I had done for volumes 10 and 11 were really too sparse and vague, and so I fleshed them out more. I’m almost done with Snowflake step 2 for volume 10, but I got stuck on a somewhat major plot thread. I can’t figure out what I want to do, and it was getting late, so I decided to call it a day and work on it tomorrow.

For now, I’ll keep volumes 9, 10, and 11 separate, and then later after I write them maybe I’ll figure out if they’ll be too short individually.

I’ll continue to work on the Snowflake step 2 of volumes 10 and 11, and once those are done, I’ll go back to work on Snowflake step 4 for volume 10.

I did pray more while I was working today, and I think God did help me figure out some plot points I had gotten stuck on!

Time spent writing: 6 hours, 24 minutes
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour 5 minutes

My takeaway for today: Remember to pray for help while I’m working!

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