We’re nearly done the first week of September and I figure I should say how I’m doing so far with keeping up with my prep schedule.

I can say that so far it’s going well. Though I should be candid and say that some of the prep was started earlier than scheduled. Some inspirational intake had already taken place throughout August just because I was looking for things to watch that I had excuses for 🙂 And a skeleton plot for this year’s project has been in my mind for a while (though with several bones missing). So this is the time to pin some ideas down.

Speaking of which, my secret Pinterest board is looking pretty full now. I haven’t yet finished going through all of my other, public boards and seeing what to repin for inspiration, so I should finish doing that. And I’ll make the board public once I’m ready to announce the project title – probably in November.

As far as focusing more on inspiration – I’ve got my list right next to my chair where I eat, and I’ve been mindful to watch something on the list while I eat. I generally need to sit for an hour after eating so I take that time to either finish off whatever I’m watching, or play one of the video games that I also have on my list. There is a broad range of both television and video games that feed into the subjects I’m writing on this year, so finding inspiration hasn’t really been a challenge – just finding the time to do it all!

I also took some extra time the past couple of weeks to finalize my working cast. I may have more characters to add down the line, but an essential cast was necessary just to know that I have enough roles filled to move the story.

As far as what I’ve been focusing on the most this past week – major decisions about the world itself – its history, how it currently works, why it works that way.

One thing I still need to figure out is an initial cause. There are a number of major events that occur in this story, but currently in my mind they are unrelated – in the sense that they are caused by different things. So I need to rework that, figure out how the different events can be connected so that there is one initial event that chain-reactions into all the others. Otherwise, too many unrelated catalysts all happening at the sme time can come across as convenient, and pull the audience out of the story. There needs to be a natural flow to everything or else it feels like the author is interfering. So I’ve still got some work to do there.

How about you? Are you doing any NaNoWriMo prep this September? Are you waiting til October to start prep? Let me know in the comments! 🙂