Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm one of those people that works like this:

Make a Title, and work the story AROUND it. I work completely backwards. If the title itself doesn't give me inspiration, I can't even start. After I have that, I come up with a plot. What will happen. When I'm through with that, I do characters. When I'm through with those, I do a chapter map, which looks like this:

(o) 1. "Chapter Name" - 5 Pages

The (o) is usually representative that I'm currently working on the chapter. If its complete, I put (X) instead there. (Yes. I map out how many pages are to a chapter. I have all 150 pages already plotted out for which chapter. I'm ridiculous when I do this, I really am.) I also work in InDesign, pull out all 150 pages on the sidebar, and then put in a background, place in a textbox, and place which page the new titles will be on so I know where I am while writing. (I'm seriously insane when I do this.)

WHICH: brings me to my next awesome ordeal. Since I'm insanely crazy with first starting out, do any of you have a cover designed yet? This is mine right here. For a screenie example of what my InDesign looks like, you can see it here and here.

Well, first of all, here's my cover:



And as for my method? I'm a total pants-er. I'm actually surprised I even have a title, let alone a cover, this early in the month because I usually have no idea what I'm doing until I do it. xd I do tend to make each chapter roughly 1667 words, though.

Jester--you're so organized! Lovely cover too.

I can never come up with titles for my stories. They're all saved under working titles on my computer (usually something like, 'Main Character Name's Story'). I'll be lucky if I can come up with a decent title by the time I'm ready to write a query letter (which won't be for a long time, I'm sure).

Covers are fun though. I'm an artist too so I love drawing up sketches of potential covers for my stories, just for the hell of it. But it's hard to have a cover without a title, so that's as far as I get sweatdrop

Miss Pagan Rose, just from your cover I wanna read your book.

I decided against doing a cover this year. Usually I do lots of prep and an outline! This year I forgot about Nano until Oct 28. So I just mashed some Google images vaguely related to the five storylines together and called it a day. Only took like 10 minutes.



As for what little outlining I did, the stories are all pulled from a fantasy world I dreamed up in high school but never did anything with. Since I had no time this year I just fell back on that. Ah course, this being a high school creation I've had to change a lot of stuff on the fly. Like 95% of the characters were male and the motivations behind most of the events in the story were woefully pathetic. Oh well. Got a nice buncha notes piling up in a seperate word document.