Category: Works in Progress

My life seems to be settling into a comfortable word-count routine again, which is good news in terms of getting the novel draft finished but somewhat crap in terms of interesting blogging. I have noticed how much easier this whole novel-writing-thing is when you actually have a midpoint to the story – perhaps the first real tangible sign I’ve had that this whole planning thing (even in the minuscule levels of planning that I’m doing) is likely to work for me. I actually caught myself thinking “36,000 words, that’s nothing” as I looked over the notes last night. Slowly but surely the writer-brain is finally catching up with the ambition. Today there will be writing, followed by marking, followed by Death Race if time allows. And if all that gets done before eleven o’clock tonight, there may even be a few hours spent tinkering with the Claw draft.

Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date: 8,288 Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour Period: 2,037 Deadline: July 23rd Spent twenty-four hours wibbling over what I’d done, trying to work my way into the project. Cut what I’d done for the second chapter (not deleted, just cut away for the moment and set aside until I hit a narrative beat where the events feel more appropriate), then spent the last twenty-four re-starting the chapter from scratch. Much happier this time around, even if it does give me negative progress on the wordcount. I predict this will happen a couple of times in the drafting process for this one – I’m sufficiently clueless about what I’m doing that I’ll happily rewrite and expand upon existing scenes from the novella-length-draft without realising that they shouldn’t be happening yet.

Meet the new project du jour destined to occupy my evenings: Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date:9,466 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 609 Deadline: July 23rd Yep, I’m taking another stab at the problem dubbed “Peter Doesn’t Have a Finished Novel.” This became the most likely candidate because I have a basic outline of what happens (care of the sketchy-novella-length draft I wrote at the start of 2007) and it’s total comfort-zone writing (Noir SF with squicky sex). I may have overburdened this with to many ideas for it to actually work as a novel-length MS, but I figure it’s the best starting point I’ve got to get a feel for writing at that length.