While I was waxing poetic about my critique partner yesterday, I mentioned that we learned a new technology to connect with for our sprints. 

After watching my friendly neighborhood teen connect through Discord, I was intrigued by the app for use with writing partners. It could do video, audio, and text chat on both a computer, and a phone app. And the ability to separate convos by chat room made it very appealing to me. 

Skype may do all of these things too, I'm honestly not sure, but I've had so damn many skype calls dropped that I wanted to check into something else. While I and my critique partner stumbled around on the site until we figured out how to make it work for us, here is a video that walks you through the basics quickly.

Now that I've been using the platform for a couple weeks, I can tell you there are a few things I love about it.

1. Ease of connecting and disconnecting voice chat.

During our writing sprints, my CP and I can pop on and off with a mouse click. We report in on what we did. Decide on a time to start the next sprint and click back off. There's no weird dialing or waiting for someone to answer to connect. We pop on when we're done and we can see if the other person is there with us.

2. Integrated chat and voice. 

We can send each other links, pictures, and although we haven't used the feature yet, we can share our screens. All of this we can do with the audio live. We did video too, but honestly, we're writing at the end of the day, and no one wants to see me sans makeup glaring down at the computer.

3. The ability to shut off social media. 

​I already turned off most notification pushes to help me with my productivity. And this extra step allows me to completely shut down my browser and focus on the task at hand. No more little red numbers telling me there's been activity on my Twitter or Facebook to pull me away from what I'm doing.


I'm not going to jinx what's been an awesome run so far, so I'm saying this knocking on wood, but this has made voice chat as easy as texting for me, and I'm excited about all the different ways I can use this platform in the future. 

Usually I have a Facebook group to do my cheerleading on during NaNoWriMo, but I'm thinking this year, we might also have a Discord server. In fact...I'm gonna go ahead and start one just to see if anyone wants to pop on there. So if you want to give it a try and connect with me come November use this Invite

https://discord.gg/ftZE94x​

I'm super excited about using this platform for connecting with writers and readers. If you're on Discord, do you use it just for gaming? Or are you using it for something else as well? Are there any servers you spend all your time on? Tell me how you use the app.

I'd love to hear all about it.

~Roxy

I've never been the one to curate a playlist for a book or series, but sometimes, songs pop up and I listen to those bad boys on repeat for days until a book starts to pour out.

For any of you who were around for my Hybrids, you know Shelly's song was "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry. But that was the closest thing I ever had to inspiration music.

This new world I'm working on has hit me hard and for the first time a playlist has started forming itself. So I though I'd share. I don't listen to the censored versions of songs either, so if you're not one for curse words, this isn't going to be your jam. Although if you're not into curse words, I can guarantee, my books aren't for you either. LOL!

For my writer friends who might be looking for songs to feed your muse, take a listen. And for any of my readers out there, see if you can guess the themes you might be seeing in the future.

The last song here, "Honestly" by Gabbie Hanna is the one that started it all. The beat and the emotion combine for something that I can't get out of my head.

What are you listening to on repeat right now? I'd love to hear it!

~Roxy

That's it, you guys. I have to confess something. I've cheated on my pantser brethren. Yesterday, I finished up my first ever plot.

I know. I'll give you a few moments. Anyone who has been with me for the long term knows the vast majority of my plot lines are developed on the fly. My characters tell me the story and I go with it. They yelled so loud at points that I practically needed ear plugs to shut off the storylines. 

Which was awesome. It was. But then when writer's block came knocking, I wasn't prepared for it. I could start. No problem. Because there's something exciting and inspiring for me about a blank page no matter what my brain is going through. But when I'd get to that first beat where stuff would need to go wrong...all that inspiration and character driven story line was just gone.

Call it writer's block, or just a general muting of the HEA's in my mind because of the way the world is, whatever caused it, I was completely unable to finish a story. As in...there are at least 3 manuscripts over 50k on my computer right now that need an end. I had to put them aside.

Last month I decided I needed to get myself excited about something again. So I looked back and tried to remember the last time (sales or not) I had fun. It was when I worked on my April Fools For Love collection. (All the books are still available if you need a smile too.)

We wrote books that were funny, and had all kinds of pranks and misdirection surrounding April Fools Day. Every damn book I read by the talented people I worked with made me smile. So we're doing it again. (Look for an expanded collection in 2020, folks. *shameless plug*)

But all of that happy brings me back around to my very real fear of not being able to get to the end of a book. So I decided I'd give myself a month to plot out a novella-length story. My due date was yesterday, so of course I was still working on it yesterday. That's exactly why I need deadlines.

I had some basic notes and a premise for the story, but I didn't have a big moment or an ending. Which...are kind of important. 

This pantser then got on her ice-dancing Bambi baby legs, and skated around the internet to figure out what plotting meant to her. Her is me, by the way. I need to stop talking in third person. It's weird. But this moment was so epic for me that the drama kind of called for it.

So right now you're probably saying, "Get to it, Roxy. How did you plot?"

Alright, alright. Geez. I needed to set the scene, okay?

I made an excel spreadsheet. Because spreadsheets are awesome. I made 7 columns, after a little fiddling and adding some when I found I needed them. And I filled out the form.

The 7 pieces of information I gathered were...

1. Scene Number. 
This is just your basic 1,2,3...etc to show me the order, and when I need to be at the halfway point word count wise.

2. Characters.
Who is in each scene? And if I have a few characters that come into play later, I altered earlier scenes so they didn't pop up out of nowhere. This also let me tally how many players I was putting in this thing. With a novella, I need to keep the team slim.

3. Main Event.
This was a one sentence fragment description of what the scene was really about. Each scene has something important that happens, and this way, I'd know what the end goal was.

4. Setting.
Where is everyone for this scene? What place will they be interacting inside of? Just like the characters, I wanted to keep the settings to as few places as possible. That way I have familiarity and I don't have to spend as many words placing people in the world. 

5. POV (Point of View).
This was one of the columns that got added in, and became important when I was looking at how the story was progressing. I didn't want to spend five scenes with my hero and then bump over to my heroine for a single scene before bopping back to my hero again. So I put the name of whose point of view the scene would take place in.

6. Timeline.
Because the book I was plotting had a specific holiday it needed to take place around, the timeline was extra important, and I put the specific date (MM/DD) in for each scene. It let me figure out where the bulk of the action needed to take place, and gave me some scope of how long ago important events happened. 

7. Why it Matters.
This was one of the first things I wrote down along with the Main Event column. Because there is no point in having a scene if it doesn't add something to the story. If the Main Event is filler, or just gets a character from point A to point B, it's not worth writing down. I know I need this book to be a novella, and extraneous scenes have to get the ax. If I can see that something isn't worth having in, it gets cut.

So even before I had everything down in note form, I started filling in what I did have into my handy dandy spreadsheet. And the end practically wrote itself. You could have knocked this pantser over with a feather. 

My other worry about plotting was that I'd never want to write the story if I already knew what happened. But I was more excited than ever to get started, and had to force my feet to carry me away to get the chores done I'd been putting off all morning. And I think that was all because I didn't do what everyone else told me to. I didn't have an epic ten page synopsis detailing every scene. I didn't have a beats page lined up that broke each section down into the standardized beats of a story. Nope. I had my little old spreadsheet. 

And while I thought it might be interesting for some people to see how I broke my story down, I'm not at all saying you should totally do this my way. I'm saying explore what's out there, and explore how other people work. Try some things out. If they don't work, it's not because you failed, it's because you haven't found the right fit yet. 

I think I found my plotting glass slipper, and I'm about to rock that bitch on a killer night out. 

Or I'm heading into work and already thinking about the next book on my list to plug into my new template. 

Either way, I hope you find something that works well for you. Or just ride the pantser wave. I'll be writing this story, and another, since they are both novellas during NaNoWriMo this year. So make sure you add me as a buddy. I'm over there as Roxy Mews. Just look for the purple hair. Let's see together what happens in November when a pantser plots.

~Roxy