I’m unpublished, you have to submit first, but I keep on practicing my craft. I wrote a novel last year and considered putting it on a closet shelf along with one I wrote several years ago during NaNoWriMo. However, after using the latest one for a writing class sponsored by the Guppy chapter of Sisters in Crime, I decided to take a second look at it.

A class taught by Beth Terrell followed my Guppy class. She asked the right questions to make me reconsider my plot. The class members thought my opening scene was lame, although I thought it was brilliant. So it was back to the drawing board. I’ll get to use that brilliant scene later in the book, having come up with a better one for the beginning.

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving weekend and the days following, I’ve been working on some novel writing worksheets that work for me to plan my rewrite. Lots of writers are pansters. They start a novel without a defined plan and watch it grow organically. I tried that for my first NaNoWriMo novel and it didn’t work very well. The book is on a closet shelf. For my second NaNo novel I did a little planning and got bogged down in the middle but I got my 50,000 words.

I haven’t used worksheets before except for character sketches. I do need to know something about the main characters before I start. Again, I had to come up with my own version that worked for me. Some worksheets are difficult to complete. The questions aren’t clear. Or, it could be that I don’t want to think about it. Worksheets are always a work in progress.

Anyway, I’m in the planning stages for the next few days and then it’s on to writing.