Progress

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 29th 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.