lizvogel

Have I really not done this since... July? I can't find one later than July that isn't a NaNo post.

Mind you, a lot of that's because I didn't do much writing for much of that time. And when I did, I'd pretty much abandoned the idea of word count as a metric; it wasn't what I needed while finishing up Falling From Ground (quite the opposite, in fact), and outside of NaNo I've pretty much been in "recovery" mode since then. Oh yeah, and there were technology troubles. However, I do like having the numbers rounded up in one easily-tracked tag, so I shall now dive down the rabbit hole of my record-keeping.

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Okay, I'm back. *pant, pant*

August:
Falling From Ground = 1141

September:
Falling From Ground = 17
original short fiction = 489 ("and then the murders started", mostly the short version)

October
Falling From Ground = 502

November was NaNo 2018. 'Nuff said.

December:
original short fiction = 124

January:
original short fiction = 2616


January (and December) is entirely "Dix Dayton, Jet Jockey". Which is, hey, done!

Speaking of rabbit holes, the writing of DD,JJ was essentially done a week ago; the time since then has mostly gone to working out tedious details about spaceship propulsion systems and asteroid orbital dynamics. The asteroids particularly were challenging; it seems that there's just enough known about many of them to get me into trouble if I don't fact-check, and not enough for me to be sure of my facts. I did finally find an orbit simulator that told me more or less what I needed, but the process sucked down an amazing amount of time and ambition. I'm only just now recovering the "yay! finished!" feeling I should have when completing a brand new story that I'm pretty happy with.


Also, there was querying!

December:
Sent: 2 queries
Agents set aside for another book in a different genre: 1
Crossed off: 3, I think?

January:
Sent: 7
Crossed off: 28

Which is great! Except that I was supposed to finish the final due-diligence push on Highway of Mirrors in January, and it's... not finished. For a while there, it was going pretty well, in large part because I'm only querying agents I'm genuinely keen to work with; if I'm meh or I find I'm trying to talk myself into them, off the list they go. But querying is all too easily bumped by writing (okay) or a certain non-writing project (not so good), and so I've run aground again.


What's next? I don't even know; I think that's going to merit a post of its own.


(admin note: first use of new tag for short fiction, because cramming it in under "writing" is... unhelpful.)

This is an example of why plot as it's usually discussed doesn't make sense to me.

( Spoilers for as-yet-unfinished and unpublished novel... )


And this is part of why plot-oriented craft discussions don't work for me. They're all about those bullet points, as though that's what's driving the story. But for me, they're almost irrelevant at this stage, except for how they enable other things.

The other reason plot discussions don't work for me, of course, is that they never go into how to make those bullet points happen. They seem to think that once you have those bullet-points, it will be obvious how to get from one to another, but it never, ever is for me. There's always at least one step into a murky well of impenetrable darkness, which may conceal solid ground from which to step back out or may conceal a hole of bottomless depth and width that cannot be spanned without tools and materials and a significant investment in infrastructure. And that's the hard bit, for me.