Solid 3,000 words today. Jay gave me most of the afternoon to work. Good, good man.
Most of that increase was from importing and revising sections of the first draft to fit the new format. I’m still working at getting back into the rhythm of the story after being gone for a month. It’s harder than I had expected or I might not have let it alone so long.
Also working on a new spreadsheet to solidify the time-line of events (in the actual novel, not the whole world), where multiple things happen within a short time, and making sure that’s logical with travel-times and all.
This draft has been more streamlined than the first, so I am (when I let myself think that far ahead) waffling again on whether the story will be better served as three too-short books (I’m visualizing Spiderwick here) or one long-ish one.
Also, due to the need to polish my first 10-pages for a mss consult coming up, those pages are now (tentatively) available upon request. The tentatively part depends on whether I know you. ;) I’m not yet so confident about it all that I’ll give it to anyone.
E-mail me if you’re interested.
Still hoping to get a few hours of writing in after the kids’ bedtime. My goal is to be back to normal production by the end of the weekend. If I can do that I should still have the first book (or first third of the book) done by the time school starts.
Me!!! Me please, and I promise to do better this time at actually going for constructive criticism. (I’m actually pretty good at it, I just haven’t had time to do it for your other stuff.)
Yay!!
Since I consider you a more experienced writer than myself may I ask a few questions? I’m assuming the answer is yes… ;)
1. How many words are you aiming for?
2. Are you an outlined or inspired writer? Or something in between? I’m sort of in between and I suspect that is the trouble I’m having in deciding exactly when my story will be finished.
3. What do you consider a “short” novel or “long novel” and how is that defined by the target audience (kids, adults, or something else)?
4. Do you have a “sweet spot” for how many words you write a day? I started by telling myself I “only had to do 500”, just to get going. Now I’m consistently higher than 1,000 but I can’t seem to break that threshold. My novel seems to be consuming all my brain cells all day long (thinking about it, writing on tiny scraps of paper, deciding lingering questions) but I can only squeeze out an hour or two to actually, you know, work on it!
And if you want to send some of your work my way I’ll be happy to read it, but only if you want to, and I can’t promise how good I am at constructive criticism.