I haven't been keeping up on HW or posting for the last few months, since I was in America for a summer job and taking a break from everything except reading and trying to be socially competent. But now I'm back in the Middle East and homeschooling once more, so I'm hoping to get caught up with what's been happening on HW and start posting again.

I miss having neat conversations with you all! Hope things have been going well. I've moved on to a new writing project - a novella about an Evil Overlord who finds out he's doomed to be overthrown by a hero of light and decides to make the best of it. For this project I'm going to try doing extensive planning before I actually start writing.

Welcome back! That sounds like a good novella premise.

Hey sheesania!

Welcome back.

Thanks for the welcomes, guys!

Extensive planning is often good for one's stories, because even if you eventually discard the plan then you are at least tangibly resisting a previous idea, which helps add concreteness to what you are in fact writing. Not knowing the direction or purpose of your story, in my opinion, cripples it, except for stories whose purpose is to explore themes of uncertainty or to simply expound raw, unfiltered mind (a kind of story for which I have very little appreciation).

Yup. I think planning will help me be a lot more confident when I actually go into writing the story - I won't be constantly second-guessing my choices as I write since I will have already thought about and decided most of them.

Welcome back! I always find I write better, and a lot more, when I have planned more and have an in-depth plot to follow.