Claw Progress

Claw Draft
Projected Total: 25000
Total Words to Date: 10,475
Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 1,931
Deadline: April 30th

Chapter five is done. Which means I’m now settling into a comfortable rhythm of a chapter per night, more or less, with tinkering time and short-story writing occurring in the mornings. In theory, if my plan is to be trusted as a guide (it shouldn’t), I am now halfway through the novella. While I’m running lower than the anticipated wordcount at this point, I’m not too stressed about that – I’m thinking the next draft will see the story balloon out dramatically, requiring a third draft to cut things back.

I am freaking out a little about the pacing of things though, since by this point in Horn there had been much death and destruction, while by this point in Claw there is only scratch marks, minor-character death, snark, and romance subplots which are not inherently doomed from the outset. I’m a little wonky on writing the last one, for many reasons, not the least of which is my general fascination with doomed romances (see my fascinationwith the Gothic novel).

I think I’ve also managed to peg down a bunch of stuff about the past and future of Aster and a bunch of the other characters, complete with a rough timeline about where and when things occurred and why it ends with Aster being the kind of protagonist she is. And started writing a list of tropes to tackle, should I be lured into doing a third one of these. And, you know, built a Miriam Aster folder to keep the details in once place, so I don’t have to keep going back over the last manuscript in order to work out whether or not I’ve actually mentioned things like a character’s eye-colour or apartment before. This is most unlike me, so we’ll see how long such ordered recordkeeping lasts.