Working, working, working. . .
Did about 3000 words today on chapter three. I’m really happy with it. I think it’s going to be a shorter chapter though, maybe only 4000 words total. Famous last words — the last time I thought that it would only take 1000 words to finish up a chapter I ended up with 3000. . . so we’ll see. I hope that I’ll be able to finish chapter three, at least the hand written part, tomorrow.
Total word count, including hand written and typed words:
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18,300 / 100,000
(18.3%) |
I spent a lot of time brainstorming last night for this chapter and the next (chapter one and two are told from one of the main character’s POVs, chapters three and four are told from a different character’s POV.) I also got some wonderful ideas for a couple of nice plot twists that occur later on.
The brainstorming I did last night was very reminiscent of the brainstorming I did in the outlining phase of my previous novels. I feel like I generate a lot of novel energy, for want of a better term, when I brainstorm. I *love* making shit up, you know? What’s neat about this change in process for me is that all that novel energy is now more easily transferred from the outline to the actual writing. I think that’s one of the problems with the former novel — there was just too much time between outline and writing. I’d lost way too much energy, and though I tried, after my life went to hell, I was never able to get it back. It’s still a good novel, and maybe someday I’ll return to it. Just — not this day.
Another thing that I’ve noticed — because of the gap in time between writing the outline and writing the text, it always seemed to me as if the outline was set in stone. It was very difficult for me to re-imagine the chapters, to actually write them in a different fashion, though often, that’s what I needed to do. The stuff that I write out by hand is still very fluid to me. I can easily change it as I’m typing it up. I don’t have to go with what’s on the page at all.
The two things that I end up changing the most are chronology and summary, that is, putting things into chronological order, as well as actually spelling out things that I just summarized when I was writing by hand. Which actually makes sense to me, as ideas just occur to me as I’m writing, and they need to be woven back into the start.
The other thing I keep changing are the names. I think I finally have all of Pari’s (Paridokht) family (she’s in the middle of seven kids.) Derik’s family also took a lot of time, and I didn’t actually settle on some of the names until halfway through the second chapter. I made up more mythology of their gods too, which just pleases me no end.
So now I need to go find lunch. And try to come out of story land for a while. And get more cream — I discovered much to my dismay this morning that the cream I’d bought yesterday at Trader Joe’s actually had an expiration date of October 2nd. Ugh.
Hope ya’ll are having as marvelous a weekend as I am!