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April Word Count / Goals
Thursday, May 1st, 2014 11:47 amHaley novel: 2569
Total new words in April: 2569
Yeah, totally blew my quota. There are excuses; Science Festival at the local university ate several evenings and an entire weekend, and of course there were taxes. But mostly it was because Chapter 14 kept kicking my ass. And 15 is being even more obstreperous.
I am an intuitive writer, and story comes to me as words, not as pictures or movie images or, ghod forbid, an intellectual decision to write something that works like [this]. Ideally, it comes as the first words, following naturally from the scene before. Sometimes it's a chunk from the middle of a scene, a sentence fragment or even a paragraph, but it generally comes attached to enough stuff in my head that I know what the surrounding words will be like. And this works great, about 95% of the time.
The end of this book is being the other 5%. I know what kind of scenes I need, to wrap up the various sub-plots, but for most of it I have NO WORDS. And the words I do have aren't coming with the necessary context attached to them, and what context they do have is... going to take some juggling to make it fit on a purely practical level in-story. So I'm having to sort out on a purely intellectual level what [this] scene will be, and what order it will come in, and what sort of emotional weight it will have, and how much screen time it merits... and that is not how I normally work! So it is coming slowly, and hard.
Having consciously bashed out the approximate shape of the end of the book, I did finally start getting some words yesterday, lines and even one or two paragraphs spread scattershot through the last half-dozen scenes. It's a very jigsaw-puzzle way of working, and it hazards things not fitting once I finally write up to them, but it seems to be what I've got to work with this time. So work I shall.
The query goal was to go through the AAR database, and that... didn't happen. It's still a good idea, and I still intend to do it, but it may have to wait for a little while.
May's goal: finish the book.
Total new words in April: 2569
Yeah, totally blew my quota. There are excuses; Science Festival at the local university ate several evenings and an entire weekend, and of course there were taxes. But mostly it was because Chapter 14 kept kicking my ass. And 15 is being even more obstreperous.
I am an intuitive writer, and story comes to me as words, not as pictures or movie images or, ghod forbid, an intellectual decision to write something that works like [this]. Ideally, it comes as the first words, following naturally from the scene before. Sometimes it's a chunk from the middle of a scene, a sentence fragment or even a paragraph, but it generally comes attached to enough stuff in my head that I know what the surrounding words will be like. And this works great, about 95% of the time.
The end of this book is being the other 5%. I know what kind of scenes I need, to wrap up the various sub-plots, but for most of it I have NO WORDS. And the words I do have aren't coming with the necessary context attached to them, and what context they do have is... going to take some juggling to make it fit on a purely practical level in-story. So I'm having to sort out on a purely intellectual level what [this] scene will be, and what order it will come in, and what sort of emotional weight it will have, and how much screen time it merits... and that is not how I normally work! So it is coming slowly, and hard.
Having consciously bashed out the approximate shape of the end of the book, I did finally start getting some words yesterday, lines and even one or two paragraphs spread scattershot through the last half-dozen scenes. It's a very jigsaw-puzzle way of working, and it hazards things not fitting once I finally write up to them, but it seems to be what I've got to work with this time. So work I shall.
The query goal was to go through the AAR database, and that... didn't happen. It's still a good idea, and I still intend to do it, but it may have to wait for a little while.
May's goal: finish the book.
