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Daughter of Mystery: Still on Track
Dec. 25th, 2011 12:19 amI have 7 more writing days to meet my goal of a complete (very rough) first draft by the end of the year. I have 3 more POV-lets to finish, and at this point have very detailed outlines for what needs to go into them. The last two were unusually long -- nearly 8000 words between the two of them -- so my sense of how much I have left is a little off, but I don't think the remaining 3 are going to be that wordy. In any event, if I pace myself at two days per section, that gives me an extra day wiggle room. Writing during family holiday vacations has its ups and downs. One the one hand, nothing but free time; on the other hand, even when I'm not involved in group activities (marathon Settlers of Catan) it can be hard to concentrate on composition.
A couple of random process observations. (1) That handful of advance out-of-order snippets I wrote? Even though they all still exist in some fashion in the final text, the actual content I wrote (including many of the factual details of what happens) is different in every case. They serve more as emotional "anchors" for where the story has to be at that point. (2) With my story being so centered of female characters, I often have scenes were all the pronouns are "she", which makes it tricky to clearly identify actors/speakers without repeating personal names annoyingly often. (This is one element I have on the revision to-do list to make sure I've handled consistently.) But just as I was thinking to myself, "Gee, it sure is awkward not to have the convenience of a he-said/she-said alternation," it occurred to me that there's vast amounts of male-centric literature out there that would have the mirror problem and that maybe it would be useful to see how books that contain primarily male characters handle it.
The word count's up to 117,000 so I can project the complete draft will be at least 120,000 which is in line with what I was estimating back at the beginning of November. And a third of that will have been written in this current stint. (Why yes, I am a numbers geek.) Oh, and I've still hit every single day since Nov. 1, come rain or shine.
A couple of random process observations. (1) That handful of advance out-of-order snippets I wrote? Even though they all still exist in some fashion in the final text, the actual content I wrote (including many of the factual details of what happens) is different in every case. They serve more as emotional "anchors" for where the story has to be at that point. (2) With my story being so centered of female characters, I often have scenes were all the pronouns are "she", which makes it tricky to clearly identify actors/speakers without repeating personal names annoyingly often. (This is one element I have on the revision to-do list to make sure I've handled consistently.) But just as I was thinking to myself, "Gee, it sure is awkward not to have the convenience of a he-said/she-said alternation," it occurred to me that there's vast amounts of male-centric literature out there that would have the mirror problem and that maybe it would be useful to see how books that contain primarily male characters handle it.
The word count's up to 117,000 so I can project the complete draft will be at least 120,000 which is in line with what I was estimating back at the beginning of November. And a third of that will have been written in this current stint. (Why yes, I am a numbers geek.) Oh, and I've still hit every single day since Nov. 1, come rain or shine.
