Experiments are back!! (Patreon)

Hello, hello friends!

Quick reminder before we jump into our writing experiment options: we have a stream today, at 3:30pm CST! You can find the link here. We'll also be chatting about our final Crafts & Drafts book club pick from 2024, REFUSE TO BE DONE. 150 quick pages on how to write and rewrite your story in just 3 drafts.

Okay, okay, on to the experiment options!!

The first was inspired by our very own RainyHammer, the PomLESSdoro!

This looks like it'll be a good tool for those days where motivation is tricky. It's done in rounds, with short breaks. So you start off with a 50-minute sprint, and get a 10-minute break, then jump back into a 40-minute sprint, followed by another 10-minute break. You do the 50/10, 40/10, 30/10, 20/10, until you get to your final ten minute work sprint. Then you're done!! Adding this time up, it is just barely over three hours. Three hours of (mostly) dedicated work. I think it'll be really fun to see how much we can get done in this time. We could even do it during a Patreon stream as well!

The second option is throwing the outline away (x3).

This was actually inspired by one of our Crafts & Drafts book club picks, How to Write a Mystery. The suggestion is to write the outline of your story one day, but then "throw it away," and start over the next day. Repeat that process three times, and in theory, your brain will only remember the absolutely BEST, most interesting details of your story. So you're building upon more and more greatness each time. (In theory.) After having finished my outline-a-thon recently, I think this could be either really awesome or really awful bahaha. It might feel a bit like purgatory, or I could come up with my favorite outline yet. Who knows!

And our final option is the Goodbye Zero Draft.

Okay, I'll confess that this one is already partially in the works, but I clearly need extra motivation to finish. So this was inspired by a stream I did AGES ago with the incredible Becca C. Smith and JC Carpenter. I'd told them how I'd just heard about a woman who wrote her first draft by hand then THREW IT AWAY (or locked it up in a lockbox, never to be seen again) and then started over completely from scratch.

I've been working on my tentatively titled BEJEWELED handwritten project for, I think, over a year now. I'm over halfway through the notebook, adding a page or two every few weeks. But this would be the kick in the butt needed to actually finish it (AND THEN THROW IT AWAY OMG). And start afresh in a similar vein, my brain theoretically remembering only the best, juiciest parts, and filling in from what I now know of my characters and world with something better since I can't reference back what I've written.

I'm happy to attempt all of these options -- let me know what YOU would like to see most. :)

Thanks everyone, hope to see y'all at the stream today. Until next time, happy writing!