association-list

Twenty thou­sand (and some) words. Alter­nately one fifth or one quar­ter of the way through, depend­ing on the final word count. Fif­teen writ­ing days over the course of nine­teen days, modulo some cheat­ing to start. At this rate, my trusty spread­sheet tells me that I’ll be done on 29^th May, which at this moment seems unimag­in­ably far away (check here if you want to follow along at home). We’ll see what happens.

Sec­tion two, which is a little short, seems to be going pretty well, and has almost reached its climax, which is going to take some heavy think­ing before I get it right. Sec­tion one is dam­aged, and I’m not sure at the moment how to fix it. Dia­gram­ming and more detailed out­lin­ing might be in order, if I get the time this week­end. I’m not sure that I want to launch into the third sec­tion with­out get­ting the first one done (nor am I entirely sold on the four sec­tion format that I had orig­i­nally intended. It might work better with two long sec­tions and one final short sec­tion). I’m wor­ried about the amount of revi­sion that the ini­tial stuff writ­ten here is going to require, too.

So, since it’s well past time I should have been asleep, I’ll lay out some plans and call it a night.

• Going to call it done as soon as I have a draft that doesn’t make me ill to think of it and is in the neigh­bor­hood of 100k words. This is sub­ject to change, of course, but will serve as a rough guide.

• After I finish, I’m going to take at least a month off of writ­ing any­thing new or look­ing at the book and get some short sto­ries pol­ished and out the door.

• Going to take three weeks or a month off this summer and go some­where where I don’t know anyone and get some seri­ous revis­ing and relax­ing done.

• I’ll start writ­ing exploratory shorts for what­ever comes next as soon as I’m happy enough with this one to start shop­ping it around (or when the mood strikes, you never know).

I’ve been leav­ing a couple of books half-​​finished for a while, I need to finish those off and find some time to write another of my over-​​critical updates before I forget what I’ve read.