those who can count, and those who can't

 journal, novels, shadow bound, writing life  2 Responses »
Feb 072008
 

Somewhere along the way, I forgot how to count.

This is largely a problem because revising 4,000 words a day between now and Feb 14 will not, no matter what my spreadsheet tells me, result in an extra 60,000 words revised by Feb 14.

Looks like the novel won't be finished in a week, as I've been blindly and desperately telling myself. If it was a dream of a revision, I might be able to get through 10,000 words a day and finish it in a week. Unfortunately for my head and the state of my fingernails, this is a complete bear of a revision, and some days I'm lucky to crawl forward by only 700 words, and even then I'm still leaving notes for myself to come back and fix later. Blerk.

I think I'll aim for Feb 28 instead — and hope that this time I'm counting proper.

hold onto nothing as fast as you can

 journal, novels, shadow bound  Comments Off
Jan 252008
 

Notes I left myself from the first draft:

Note to self: when Character A has a voice permanently encamped in the back of their head, it is not necessary to say "Character B said in the back of my head" every. single. time. Quit it already.

Eep! I thought I was 20,000 words from the end. I've been telling everyone 20,000. But I'm only about 7,500 words from the end. How do I fit the battle and denouement and epilogue in 7,500 words? (When will I stop sucking at estimating a novel's length? I spend 90,000 words despairing I don't have enough novel for a novel, and the last 10,000 panicking and cramming.)

one, two, three and I'm safe

 journal, novels, shadow bound  Comments Off
Jan 202008
 

Bitch Ask, and ye shall receive. The clouds haven't cleared, but it's stopped raining. Briefly, anyway. The cicadas are taking advantage of the break to shriek at each other throughout the valley, and the bloodsuckers are having a field day. I am most definitely not stepping foot out of doors without shoes, because all this rain will probably have washed those wandering male funnel webs uncomfortably close to the house.

Revisions on the second golem novel continue apace. Things looked rocky at the start there, where it took me hours to fix a paragraph, but now that I'm in to the meat of the story I've found, to my utter and endless surprise (because writers is nuts), that the prose isn't quite as abysmal as I'd feared. No doubt my beta readers will all remember this post and gleefully point me back to it when they send me their comments, which will be peppered with "This sentence? Makes no sense." Me, I'm just happy to be past the panic attack caused by accepting money for an incomplete novel.

I've gone back to the writing routine which worked for me during the first novel, back in the days when my only thought was of actually finishing a novel and I hadn't even considered the idea of submitting it for publication. Back then I worked five days straight, and took a break from wordcount on the sixth day. I still worked on that sixth day: mostly it was research, or a chance to let the plot catch up with my head. Not having to churn out words made the day feel like a weekend, though. Right now, I enter the sixth day with grand plans of writing anyway… but I don't. Taking a break is important, too. It really shouldn't be a surprise to me, I suppose, that the process I found useful on my first novel might actually be my natural process. Go figure, eh?

Also? I love my new icon.

'tis the season…

 asides, novels, shadow bound  1 Response »
Dec 232007
 

…to be absent from the blog. Sorry about that. I've had my head buried in fixing the plot, and that always leaves me silent.

I have finished the read-through and, as I suspected, I left out half the story. (Okay, maybe not half, as such. I do like to exaggerate.) Inserting the missing half while not inflating the word count might, in any other circumstance, prove difficult — but luckily (ha!), I appear to have doubled up on story as well, so cutting the extraneous should make everything balance out. That's the plan, anyway. My beta drafts always tend to grow. We'll see if this one bucks the pattern or not.

In the meantime, there is little to no chance I'll remember to update the blog between now and the new year, so have a great one, and I'll see you all on the flip side.

where were you when we took calais?

 journal, novels, shadow bound  2 Responses »
Dec 112007
 

As of Sunday night, the abysmal draft is done, or at least abandoned. From here on in, it's revision all the way, and an attempt to construct a viable beta draft.

Finishing the abysmal draft always leaves me malcontent and cranky, so I spent most of Monday stamping around and scowling. My head is full of nothing but the novel, only the novel is too big to fit. I can catalogue every flaw (real and imagined) in this draft, and I am itching to get to fixing them now, only I cannot start now, I must wait. I must read through the manuscript, to make sure my outline (which currently I stopped recording at about the sixth scene) is complete. I must contemplate the outline to ensure it makes sense and isn't entirely full of holes.1 I must scribble all the notes I will doubtless take during this process into the manuscript itself so that, come revision, I can start to tease this into its right and proper shape. Or pound it into a useless blob. One or t'other.

Today has been a little better: I've segued from being angry and itching to work on the manuscript into a calmer mood. I am also devouring books again, because I tend to starve myself of other people's writing when I'm working on an abysmal draft. I think one more night off should do the trick, and tomorrow I can start the read-through in the right frame of mind: not in the fever-flush of finishing which makes me rushrushrush, but not yet sunk into the lassitude which makes me care diddly-squat about this one because, hey, there's time.

In the meantime, I have some Asimov, Bill Bryson, and whatever's lurking under them to read, and only a single afternoon to enjoy it guilt-free.

  1. Or rather, I need to note where it is full of holes, and devise fixes. Same difference. Sorta. [↩]
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