Three and a half weeks since I last added any words to Time and the Soldier. Sheesh!
A bit over 2700 words today, which is pretty good. That largish number is due to my having had today off. I had yesterday off, as well, but Leonore and I used it to entertain ourselves rather than work at anything. We saw the new James Bond movie (much fun) and then went out to eat. But today, I wrote. Tomorrow and Sunday will be filled with the usual weekend chores, but I hope I can keep some of this momentum going.
After my previous bit of writing, I entered a weird kind of non-writing, lethargic, dull period that I can't explain. Then came the election, which put everything on hold for a few days. Then I got a flu shot at work and reacted badly with what might as well have been the flu. First time that's ever happened to me. I hope it's just due to this year's batch of vaccine and not some new age-related phenomenon.
During this hiatus, I was actually thinking plottishly, coming up with the stuff I spent today writing. So I can claim that, in a sense, I've been writing all along. But it's a sense that didn't result in anything that anyone else could read, until today, when I actually converted it all from potential stuff in my mind to real stuff on pap-- er, magnetic domains.
TimeSold is progressing nicely enough and the blue parts continue to diminish. Rereading chunks of it over the last couple of days, I realized that I'm going to have to move some parts around. I'm jumping around in the story too much. That was intentional, originally, but I've overdone it. In particular, the death of a major character happens much too early. Then, later in the ms., I go back some years in time and rehash parts of her life. It's unsatisfying and lacking in impact. Fixing that during the rewrite will be challenging.
I do have a self-imposed deadline. Leonore's break from her teaching begins on December 18, so that will be a perfect time for her to begin proofreading. (She's great at catching typos and prose infelicities.) Then I can incorporate her suggestions and have the book ready for the agent hunt by the first of the year. That fits with my schedule of having the book on the bestseller lists by the winter of 2008. Well, okay, that last part isn't included in my self-imposed deadline.
Currently, the wordcount, excluding the blue parts, is just over 120,000 words. So the final book could end up at 150,000 words, after all, as I was saying in one of my early posts. That's a bit longish.
4 comments:
30,000 by December 18? Oh, to have your discipline. Best of luck!
Well, when you put it that way, it does seem a bit unlikely.
Let's see. That's 23 days. So that's only 1304.35 words per day. Or 54 an hour. Or .91 per hour! Jeez, who can't write less than a word an hour?
Oh. That doesn't take eating, sleeping, working, commuting, exercising, grocery shopping, making lunches, or goofing off into account.
So maybe I'm being a tad overoptimistic.
Hell, writing a NOVEL is a tad overoptimistic. 1304.35 words per day doesn't sound half bad.
Of course, the real trick is reading what you wrote the previous day and remembering what the other 0.65 of that last word is supposed to be.
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That's last part of the last word in the sentence, "Suddenly, two men burst into the room, guns blazing."
(Dashiel Hammett? Or whoever it was who came up with that quip.)
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