I'm very close to the end of this book and can see everything else that happens so at this point I'm almost on autopilot. What's strange is, I wrote a lot of words today (6,250) but now that feels like chump change because I'm comparing it to what I've done on other days this week. 6,000 plus words is really good and instead of feeling ho-hum about it (funny how quickly we get used to things), I should keep in mind the long game.
If I wrote 6,000 words a day, 5 days a week, that would be 1,560,000 words per year. Novel lengths vary by genre, but let's say on average my books will be 75,000 words long.
That's 21 novels a year, rounding up.
This weekend will prove challenging. I won't have any large blocks of time to work and pretty much will only be able to write after the kiddies go to bed. So I am not going in to the next 48 hours with any expectations. I hope I can write another 10k -15k over two days and finish the book off, but realistically the first draft won't be done until Monday night. That would only give me 6 days to edit my first heroic fantasy novel, which sounds really daunting.
But hey, I got myself into this mess so I can't really complain.
And tonight's winning numbers in the Pennsylvania Lottery are:
Drafting: 4.5 hours
Daily Word Count: 6,250
Total Word Count: 86,186
Showing posts with label novel writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel writing. Show all posts
Friday, September 29, 2017
Monday, September 25, 2017
HF Novel Update 9/25/17
So I ended up deciding to scrap PLOT DEVELOPMENT. After re-outlining the remainder of the book, I realized how much story there was left to tell and that PLOT DEVELOPMENT wasn't adding much, didn't factor as much into the larger story as I had previously thought, and was just slowing me down. Put another way, I'd invented a problem in the story that didn't need to be there.
The deadliest trap is the one we set for ourselves, as Raymond Chandler once quipped.
That being said, I had to spend a significant chunk of time figuring out what had to go earlier in the story, what had to be rewritten, and where I could pick up from. The numbers below are broad estimates of how I spent my time today in the overall creative process. They're probably not even close to matching the reality, because rewrites bled over into new content, which bled over back into outlining, which ... you get the idea.
And, because I was both cutting words and writing new ones today, I'm ballparking my daily word count. The total word count is an approximation also, because there are still things to fix, rearrange, and probably cut.
Okay, disclaimers out of the way, here are the numbers:
Pre-Production: 1 hour
Rewrites: 2 hours
Drafting: 2.5 hours
Daily Word Count: ~5,000
Total Word Count: ~47,000
The deadliest trap is the one we set for ourselves, as Raymond Chandler once quipped.
That being said, I had to spend a significant chunk of time figuring out what had to go earlier in the story, what had to be rewritten, and where I could pick up from. The numbers below are broad estimates of how I spent my time today in the overall creative process. They're probably not even close to matching the reality, because rewrites bled over into new content, which bled over back into outlining, which ... you get the idea.
And, because I was both cutting words and writing new ones today, I'm ballparking my daily word count. The total word count is an approximation also, because there are still things to fix, rearrange, and probably cut.
Okay, disclaimers out of the way, here are the numbers:
Pre-Production: 1 hour
Rewrites: 2 hours
Drafting: 2.5 hours
Daily Word Count: ~5,000
Total Word Count: ~47,000
HF Novel Update - 9/24/17
Yesterday I got some words in but I'm not sure I'll keep any of them.
As my characters headed to PLOT DEVELOPMENT, I began to question my decision to send them there. I felt the story was losing momentum and that I was also putting an unnecessary complication in front of them - since there was still plenty of story left to tell, jam-packed with more and more conflict.
Even worse? The obstacle they were about to face was shaping up to be very similar to the NEXT PLOT DEVELOPMENT, so everything ground to a halt as I struggled to come up with ways to make THIS THING different from THAT LATER THING.
I couldn't come up with a solution yesterday. After I woke up this morning, while engaged in some mindless activity (why does it always happen like this) I think I figured out what I'm going to do, and it will allow me to keep most of what I wrote yesterday but damn I hate this feeling. I'm getting to the dreaded halfway point of the story, that strange and daunting space where I know how I want the last quarter of the book to go but don't yet have all the answers for how I'm going to get there.
Here are the numbers. Hopefully I keep most of these words so the day isn't a total write-off.
Pre-Production: 0
Drafting: 3.5 hours
Daily Word Count: 4,636
Total Word Count: 42,007
When it felt like I was just spinning my wheels last night, I shifted gears to something else. Rather than just get frustrated without little to show for all the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, I focused on editing The Stalked Girl, the second book in my new mystery series. The great news? That one's ready to go now and I don't have to think about it. It's up for pre-order now on Zon.
As my characters headed to PLOT DEVELOPMENT, I began to question my decision to send them there. I felt the story was losing momentum and that I was also putting an unnecessary complication in front of them - since there was still plenty of story left to tell, jam-packed with more and more conflict.
Even worse? The obstacle they were about to face was shaping up to be very similar to the NEXT PLOT DEVELOPMENT, so everything ground to a halt as I struggled to come up with ways to make THIS THING different from THAT LATER THING.
I couldn't come up with a solution yesterday. After I woke up this morning, while engaged in some mindless activity (why does it always happen like this) I think I figured out what I'm going to do, and it will allow me to keep most of what I wrote yesterday but damn I hate this feeling. I'm getting to the dreaded halfway point of the story, that strange and daunting space where I know how I want the last quarter of the book to go but don't yet have all the answers for how I'm going to get there.
Here are the numbers. Hopefully I keep most of these words so the day isn't a total write-off.
Pre-Production: 0
Drafting: 3.5 hours
Daily Word Count: 4,636
Total Word Count: 42,007
***
When it felt like I was just spinning my wheels last night, I shifted gears to something else. Rather than just get frustrated without little to show for all the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, I focused on editing The Stalked Girl, the second book in my new mystery series. The great news? That one's ready to go now and I don't have to think about it. It's up for pre-order now on Zon.
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