Another May Days Wrap-up

Well, the merry old month of  May came to a close three days ago. That means the May Days Facebook group I am part of is pretty much done for the year, too. The May Days involves a group of writers working on writing two pages a day, every day. How did I do? Better than last year, at least.

I was better prepared going into this project this time, but still not as well prepared as I'd hoped I'd be back on January 1st when I set a goal of working on an outline for a mummy book for May Days. I had achieved only one of the 3 objectives I'd wanted to reach before May. I also kept getting diverted once the month started, first by the NESCBWI Conference, then by an illness and a long recovery that didn't actually take me out of play, but left me not at the top of my game.

Nonetheless, I now have:

3 pages of a first chapter (Yeah. Hurray.)
6 and 1/2 pages of notes on historical background
9 pages of character notes
9 pages of scene notes, which are laid out in the order in which they could possibly occur, so that's like the beginning of a plot.

That's a total of 27 and 1/2 pages

Additionally, I worked on the two unmet objectives from my original May Days goal back in January. I've read 38 percent of The Plot Whisperer (That's right, I'm reading it on my Kindle.) and I've been going over old research I'd collected for this project. On top of that, I got a few Original Content posts out of this. With the May Days, blog posts count toward the goal of writing 2 pages a day. And as a result of the plot studying I've been doing, I'm in the process of pulling together what I might call a...a...plotting philosophy.

So while this didn't turn out exactly as I hoped back in January, I am far, far ahead of where I was before I started working on May 1st. I have a number of irons in the fire, balls in the air, so I can't continue to give the mummy book as much attention as I did last month. But  I  am at a point where I think it is realistic to try to dedicate a few units of time a week to it.