Back at the desk

I'm back at my desk. Kirsty finished the alpha draft last weekend but put me under orders not to do any work for the week. So now I'm faced with a thick pile of paper with red pen scattered throughout it. Though the first third of the book needs quite heavy editing, pretty much everything that's left of the previous draft she wants me to restructure.

There are a few other bits to work on too, I think about 3 to 4 weeks work to be done to form it into a beta draft. That is if I can get myself into gear and actually concentrate on the damn thing. I'm not doing very well at that at the moment, it's taken me two days just to get round to this blog post.

Once I get back into a regular schedule the word count will begin updating again.

Team alpha, go

Huzzah, 'tis all done, the alpha draft of Sibling is complete. Weighs in at 185,450 words in 29 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue. That's 400 sides of A4 with 1.6 line spacing. It took a mighty 2 and a half hours just to spell check.

Throughout the spell check though I saw plenty of dodgy text emphasising for me that is is very much still of alpha quality. How long it will take to improve to beta quality will depend on how much Kirsty destroys in her reading. I'm hopeful of just a few weeks but I thinks rather optimistic.

So close, but yet..

This morning I would have said 2,000 words will finish the draft. Having written over 3,000 today and still not quite getting there I was clearly wrong. Also I've just read some advice online which implies that for first time authors publishers like 80,000 to 120,000 words and anything over that upper limit is likely to get refused out of hand. ho-hum. I'm going to choose to ignore that advice for the time being.

Today I have also learned that when it comes to writing large quantities of combat nothing's better than Nine Inch Nails to keep me in the right frame of mind.

The continuing chapter expansion

Those paying attention will notice the current and last chapter has just jumped from 28 or 28 to 29 of 29. The chapter was just getting so excessively long it had to be cut in two, and since there was quite a good place to do this, I did it. Just the planned ending is plenty enough to make the new chapter 29 a decent length, plus there may be an epilogue I'm undecided so far.

Also today I reached 180,000 words, huzzah, much more than I dared hope. Not sure how much more there'll be, a couple of thousand at least. If I manage to concentrate tomorrow I may get the draft finished, but if I'm honest Thursday's more likely.

Writing is easy...

Finishing is taking far longer than I expected, I've dropped from 3000 words/day to 1500-2000 words/day. This seems to be a combination of the fact that every scene is super-tense with crucial interactions going on and that though I have the intent for every scenes with a start and an end making it all work is very difficult. At this rate I may have the draft finished by Wednesday but even that feels hopeful.

I am generally happy with all the chapter 27/28 material so far, it's just proving to be quite a slog getting it onto the page.

"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." - Gene Fowler

end on the horizon

Got back into the word progress today hitting 3,000 words again which is great, probably half of chapter 27. The more important thing is I think I've finally got the ending all fitted together including all the elements I wanted. Looks like finishing the draft by the end of October is fairly unlikely now but so long as I can keep on track with by current plan it shouldn't be by much.

For now though I have more important tasks at hand, such was watching Due South dvds.

round blocks and round holes isn't always enough

So I've not written anything today yet and I'm not likely to. I'm currently trying to piece together the closing two chapters. I've got a number of events and scene ideas but making it all fit together in a way that works and has everything developing at the right pace is rather difficult. I won't be able to look at it this evening so I wouldn't be surprised if it takes tomorrow and the weekend to get it all together.

I currently find myself staring at my list of thoughts and waiting for the ah-ha moment where I see how to fit it all together... still waiting...