Novella Diary, Claw, Days 10 to 13

So I didn’t get online a lot between Friday and Sunday, for a whole variety of reasons, so this is going to be a pretty truncated entry that covers the last four days. Strap yourselves in.

Day 10

Things I did today: woke up on the Gold Coast and had breakfast with my parents; drove to Brisbane and worked for a few hours in the QWC office; had lunch with co-workers; came home and went through a couple of options for the Tooth and Claw Whispers reading on Saturday; do some prep work for the next Year of the Author Platform course I’m teaching in a few weeks; watched NXT with the Flatmate.

Things I didn’t do today: write anything on the novella.

Total Daily Writing Time: 0
Daily Word Count Total: 0

Day 11

Session 11.1 (11:43 PM – 12:28 AM)
Word Count: 600 

Mostly revision on the first chapter.  Trying to streamline things a bit.

Total Daily Writing Time: 45 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 600

Day 12

Session 12.1 (12: 38 AM – 1:08 AM)
Word Count: 547

Taking my “get work done early, so you can slack off a little later in the day” habit to its logical extreme. Most of this came from doing rewrites of the first scene, and I figured I’d squeeze a few couple of minutes in ’cause I wasn’t actually sleeping all that well and Sunday…well, Sunday was looking like it’d be a write-off.

Which, turns out, it was. Rather grateful I got this done when I did.

Total Daily Writing Time: 30 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 547

Day 13

Write club. AKA the day when I catch-up from the slackness of the weekend. Arrived at Chez Slatter, nattered about writing for a bit. I have hit the bit of the manuscript where I’m forced to engage the Kress protocol – I’m stuck, very stuck, so I’m going back and to the point where the story made sense to me and rewriting from there, doing slightly different things in order to send the story flying off in a new direction. There will be lots of rewrites in this write-club.

Session 13.1 (11: 55 AM – 12:25 PM)
Word Count: 1,097

Wrote a new opening scene. Deleted a bunch of older scenes that now seemed kinda superfluous. Productive in its own way, but it dropped the overall manuscript wordcount back a couple of steps.

Session 13.2 (12:36 PM – 1:07 PM)
Word Count: 735

Session 13.3 (1:50 PM – 2:00 PM)
Word Count: 273

Did a whole bunch of scene tinkering between the last session and this one. Wrote maybe a paragraph or two of new words, but mostly just tightened the language or inserted some information into the scenes. I don’t ordinarily count this as writing, unless I’m actively trashing a scene and re-writing it from scratch, so the count started again once I hit the point where it was time to start a new scene.

Session 13.4 (2:43 PM – 3:20 PM)
Word Count: 1,016

Some work on the new chapter. Manuscript is starting to look… unwieldy.

Session 13.5 (3:55 PM – 4:32 PM )
Word Count: 866 

Finally hit a version of the first scene that will work.

Total Daily Writing Time: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 3,987

Total Manuscript Writing Time: 15 hours, 12 minutes
Total Manuscript Word Count: 15,471