Johne

I made up a word and discovered it was not only real, but exactly how I would have defined it had I known it was real.

Some of us are writing Fantasy novels about private detectives who are themselves non-humans!

With all due respect, I'd start by reading it, and then see if that's something you'd like to try to write.

SF/F author John Scalzi has thoughts on shopping agreements. He defines what they are in his Twitter thread and why he's against them in his case. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/07/27/a-twitter-thread-on-shopping-agreements/

I created my own template in Notion which I fill out for each new chapter. It leans heavily on the Five Commandments of story from The Story Grid. Here's how it looks in practice:

I bought a lifetime license during some promotion or another, and use it as part of my weekly submission process. I don't follow the suggestions blindly, but get enough good insight that it's worth the step. Furthermore, (and this is HUGE), PWA syncs with Scrivener so I can close Scriv (this is key), open the project in PWA, and make edits in PWA which will automatically sync back into my Scrivener project. That's amazingly helpful.

I'm sharing a milestone, not selling anything, but I suppose that could be considered a plug in advance of a promotion.

I think the best I can suggest is creating one. We have just three members in our group, and I think that's pretty much perfect. We meet every Tuesday and turn in a new chapter. We use Google Docs for collaboration. We This is the original SHEG manifesto, but our group is a little more casual. My friends Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez have a free webinar which explains how they created and run their SHEG. https://www.pagesandplatforms.com/sheg-webinar-signup Initially, we were very light on making suggestions about word choices and limited our critique to whether our chap

From The Writer magazine. https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/fiction/how-to-write-great-fantasy/

Learn about the underlying components of story structure. (I learned this through studying The Story Grid, but there are lots of other teachers who are also doing great work in this regard, including our own C.S. Lakin and K.M Weiland.) Write every day. (Caveat: I take one day a week away from the keyboard, but if I spend some of my free time reading, watching movies, or daydreaming about story beats for my manuscript, I consider that part of it - it's all feeding the creative engine). During the rest of the week I write every day at the same time, and once the habit

Lynn beat me to it.

I just submitted my final chapter to my editing group - I keep them straight by including a three letter acronym for the book title, the chapter number and title, and the revision date in the filename:

No clue. I don't measure wordcount by time, I measure it by completion. By that I mean I know I need to satisfy the Five Commandments of Story for each chapter, and I work until I get them all in. I turn in a new polished chapter to my editing group every week, and that's been running around 6k words pretty regularly.

If you're referring to how many drafts are required for publication, I can tell you that most of my earlier drafts were a result of learning different tools. This eleventh draft, a page one rewrite, is really spiritually my second draft. If I knew then what I know now, this would have been the second draft, and I'd be able to publish after draft five: Initial sloppy draft to get things going. Steven Pressfield wrote about this last week: "I work exactly the same way. My version of John S’s principle is “Cover the Canvas.” By which I mean, “Get paint on every inch of the blank su