Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result:
‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days.
Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off and spent two hours revising Claw in which I resolved my issues with the structure of the novella’s first chapter.
I can have more days like that one, I think. It’s kinda nice to be doing stuff again.