Herding Cats: According to Wikipedia: "An idiomatic saying that refers to an attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are uncontrollable or chaotic. Implies a task that is extremely difficult or impossible to do, primarily due to chaotic factors."
This is how I feel about my novel right now. I have 13 Chapters finished (how ironic, not that I'm superstitious) and each one sort of lives as a mini-story on its own, though there are tiny silver threads in there to (hopefully) tie the story together. Protagonist's character definition and back-story is being done in nearly every chapter. To make matters worse, the chapter timelines sometimes overlap and sometimes skip around in time.
Challenge: make the tiny silver threads between chapters into steel cables so hopefully a less segmented back-story for each character is needed and a more seamless timeline emerges.
Related Tasks for Self:
- Find a way to mention other characters in the context of earlier character story lines before all the characters come together later in the story. Build up the character connection thread.
- Consider removing the dates at the beginning of each chapter and segment the book into sections (with multiple chapters in each section) then associate dates to each book section.
- Try out free apps such as Gingko to attempt to organize my chapters by section and keep notes about each Chapter, areas to work on, etc. Using just Microsoft Word is getting cumbersome.
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