I took a dive into a new project yesterday, so I’ll be in first draft mode for the next month or so. That means I will have little brain for anything else. I’d actually already written the opening scene. I got an idea for how it should go a couple of months ago and wrote it to get it out of my head. Today I revisited it and revised it to fit the outline I eventually came up with, then moved on and wrote more of the scene.

That worked pretty well. Usually, starting a book is kind of scary. It feels like standing on the high dive, knowing you’re going to have to jump and plunge in. But when I wrote out that opening scene months ago, it didn’t feel like I was starting a book because I didn’t even really have a plot yet. I was just playing around. But then when I started working on it today, that didn’t feel like I was starting a book, either, because I was editing something I’d already written. It took all the scary out of it. It was more like easing in via the pool steps after sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water than like jumping off the high dive.

There’s still a lot of unknown ahead of me, even though I have a detailed outline and synopsis. My synopsis is more than 4,000 words, which would be about 20 pages in manuscript format. I was worried I had too much story for a book. But then when I started breaking it out into scenes to outline the scenes, I worried that I didn’t have enough scenes. It’s likely that some of these scenes will be broken down into multiple scenes, and I may come up with ideas along the way that will be inserted. My outline isn’t so rigid that it doesn’t have room to adjust as I write. It’s more of a framework to make sure I have everything I need to cover the story and character arcs.

I’m not going to try to do a full writing schedule for the rest of this week with the kind of word count I usually expect. I’m still testing the waters and getting a feel for the characters. I also need to do some prep work around the house so I have less to worry about once I get into the book. I need to do some cooking to have meals ready to go and I want to do a good house cleaning so it’ll be easier to maintain while I’m focused on writing. Starting this week without considering it official writing time should give me some momentum to get on a good pace next week.