Tag: writing

No, not like that, you bunch of weirdos. In writing. Like this:

Yup, I’ve been pounding at the words in quantity, and to judge by the photo, I’m looking angry as I do it. Oh well. I’ve learned that for some reason, my neutral facial expression — how I look when I’m not making any conscious effort to look any way at all — is usually interpreted by outside observers as ‘angry’. This annoys me, but there’s naught that I can do about it save pasting a PlastiSmile on my face at all times, and I’m not about to do that. Harumph.

Where was I? Oh yeah…writing. As of yesterday morning’s writing session, I had, at long last, finally reached the climax in Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). It’s amazing to me the various twists and turns I’ve had to take to get to this point. When I started the book, I had a very rough idea of the shape of the story, which means that I knew (a) where the story was starting and (b) where the story was supposed to end. It’s my experience, though, that these things always change along the way. I started off just charging full-speed ahead, but then at some point I realized that I’d missed a left turn in Albuquerque. (Seriously, Albuquerque, you have got to upgrade your street signage. You can’t have everybody missing their required left turns when they get there.) This required rolling back four chapters of work. Ugh!

That was the biggest setback, but there were others too, and soon I realized that I needed to bite the bullet and actually set down some plot notes in the rough form of an outline (which I hate doing). But now, after all that, I’m at the climax, which is very much turning the same way I envisioned it way back when. This is exciting stuff. At least, it is for me.

As for the actual progress in the book, by way of numbers, here is the up-to-the-minute word count (I haven’t written a word in the book yet today):

The current chapter is the Official Climactic Sequence; after that I’ll have an Epilogue where some things are wrapped up and others are left there, in hopefully tantalizing fashion, for the Inevitable Sequels To Come. (Don’t accuse me being unambitious: I can potentially envision a nine-book series with these characters. Space is a big place, bitches!) My oft-stated goal is for a first draft of no more than 180,000 words, and that still appears doable, as long as I don’t get too wordy in these last two chapters. Then, during the editing process, I should be able to lose at least 20,000 words in tightening things up and rewrites. After that, it’ll be time for…gasp…beta readers.

[Note that I have a single chapter at more than ten thousand words, which makes it rather an outlier in terms of chapter length. This bugs me, and I may try to split it in two at editing time.]

Here’s another spreadsheet I made, in hopes of making it easier to hold my own feet to the writing fire. This one charts not the word count of the specific work-in-progress, but the number of words I write per day. (Only counting my fiction words here…not counting things like blog posts and Tweets and Facebook blatherings.) I started doing this almost two weeks ago, because I decided that I needed a better way of making sure that I was hitting my daily writing quota (which I have currently set at 500 words per day). Here it is:

Each column is one month’s work, so that’s the March column with the numbers in it. I didn’t start doing this until March 20; the dates are in the left-most column and are repeated at left (so I’ll still be able to see the dates when I get to the second half of the year, as twelve columns are too wide to appear on the screen at once). At the bottom I keep a running monthly total, and it calculates my average output per day. I’ve only come in under quota twice, and most days I’ve exceeded it by a nice margin, and on a couple of days I’ve blown my quota out of the water. I like seeing that, and I don’t know why I didn’t do this a long time ago. Goal-setting is great, but making the goals visible or tangible is really helpful. In the past I’ve checked the word count of the chapter I’m working on at the end of a session and just vaguely determined that I’ve increased it by at least 500 words. Now I can see it.

Now, there will be days when I’m either under quota or right around it, which you can see. Those days correspond to days when The Wife is off from work, and on those days, my focus tends to be more on doing things with The Family Unit than in producing words. I’m largely fine with this. My main writing sessions still come Monday through Friday, from 6:00 am to 7:00 am. On weekends I tend to produce later at night. And so it goes. I’m bracing for an entire week of reduced output next month (because I’m taking a vacation), but you know what? I might just have this book done — in first draft form — before then. That amazes me. Just as month ago, I was thinking that I’d have this draft done around Memorial Day.

So there’s the navel-gazing for today. Onward and upward!

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Yup, the manuscript for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) now stands at just over 140,000 words. I’m aiming for a total length for the first draft of not more than 180,000 words, which means that if I can stick to my 500-words-a-day quota until I’m done, I should have a manuscript by Memorial Day. Then I’ll set it aside for several months before editing it, during which I’ll be at work on a project that involves neither Princesses nor SPACE!!!. It will, however, involve the son of a lighthouse keeper, a band of gypsy-thieves, and a man in black with an eye-patch and an enormous black feather in his hat. That one’s another idea that’s been knocking around my head for years, so it’s time to do some excavation. And after that, it’ll be back to my Princesses, for their sequel adventures in SPACE!!!

I love writing. I hope I can publish some of this stuff!

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Writing Update, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

It’s been exactly two months since my last writing update, so here’s where things stand on Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the final title). Basically, I’ve produced nearly 19,000 additional words since then, huzzah!

Cranking the math and assuming sixty days since Sept 13, I’ve hit my personal 500-words-a-day quota 38 times. Actually, I know it’s less than that, because I’ve had a lot of days when I’ve written more than 500 words, and there was one day where I cranked out more than 1500. I didn’t get any work done during my vacation at the end of September, so I don’t hold that against myself, but I do think I could have generally been more productive.

My problem tends to be, unfortunately, my tendency to time-waster addiction, which was bad enough before I added the Facebook Scrabble-game “Words With Friends” to my list of Things I Do When I Should Be Writing. But I’ve started the last week on a new way of doing things.

For years, I’ve been getting up on weekdays (unless I’m on vacation) at 6:00 am, because my shift at work starts at 7:30. Usually I’d take a leisurely time having breakfast, noodling about online, and then getting ready for work. What I’m doing now, though, is getting up at 6:00…and writing for at least half an hour. With that little distraction going on, I find that hitting my 500 words is, well, really easy.

Of course, the big lesson here is that productivity tends to soar when I finally close out the Web browser. Imagine that! The Internet can reduce productivity! Oh, well. I’m turning off the browser more consistently now. Next will be establishing a time limit for browsing at night.

As for the book itself, it’s going pretty well. As far as I can tell, from the rough outline in my head, I’m about to enter the book’s third (and final) act. I’ve got some revelations to drop, villains to unmask, and some set-up of future books in this series to do. Yes, I’m thinking ‘series’ here. The story I’m writing now implies a huge world — a Galaxy, actually — and years’ worth of stories. I actually had a brainstorm the other day, one of those moments when The Muse decides that I’ve been behaving myself and thus decides to throw me a bone, in the form of a throwaway line that I immediately recognized as a possible key to the entire rest of the series. Those moments are gold, folks. Gold, Jerry, gold!!!

When this draft is done, my plan is to let it sit for a few months and not look at it, before I sit down to re-read it and start the editing process. The question I’m starting to wonder is, what do I do in the meantime? Not write anything? or go the Anthony Trollope route, and plow right into the next book? I’ve had an idea for a fantasy novel rattling about in my head for several years now…and in fact, the only reason I’m not writing that book is that the idea for this one has been rattling around my head longer.

Anyway, that’s where I am. Back to Princesses In SPACE!!! (again, not the real title).

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One of the writers of the just-released — and just-flopped — Conan the Barbarian movie answers the question, What’s it like to be the writer of a movie that fails? This part spoke to me, for a lot of reasons:

My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperately needed to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in….second.

It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn’t take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player and that’s what trumpet players do, come success or failure.

Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.

Sometimes — most times, even — the only thing to do is keep going.

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Today at work, when I went to my break, I sat down with a legal pad to do a bit of outlining. Now, I’ve never been one to do a lot of outlining when I write. Mainly, I prefer to keep a few rough ideas in my head and then charge toward an ending, or I prefer to figure out my characters and then get them into a situation and see what they do. For the Space Opera project, though, I’ve found the going a bit rougher, to the point where a few months ago I realized I’d made the proverbial Wrong Turn in Albuquerque and ended up setting aside three whole finished chapters.

At that point, I decided to try an outline. Not a super-strict one, not a scene-by-scene and blow-by-blow accounting of everything that would happen, and not for the rest of the book — just some brainstorming on the next two or three chapters from that point. It worked wonders, and those chapters have flowed pretty well. But now I’m where my last bit of outlining left off, so I sat down to repeat the process.

And suddenly…about eighty percent of the remaining plot of the book suddenly sprang into my head. I figured it all out, along with several plot twists that should lend excitement, and some character motivations that I’d been struggling with (one character in particular has to do something at some point — this person just has to do this thing — but I couldn’t figure out why they had to do it, until now).

It’s a heady moment, when you finally see the story in front of you. I haven’t had that feeling in a long time. Back to the Planet of Mystery!

(No, it’s not called the “Planet of Mystery” in the book. Nor is the book called “Planet of Mystery”. Even though, right now, I kinda wish both of those things were true.)

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If and when I am ever a published author, if you give me a bad review on your blog, I promise that I will not show up in your comments section and make an ass of myself.

You have my word, folks!

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