It's Tuesday, Y'all!
May. 25th, 2010 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuAnd I wrote 3100 words today. Not as many as I'd hoped, but more than I feared about midday. Twelve thousand words to go on the first draft of the novel. That's four 3K days, or 3 4K days if I can do them. Woohoo!
Issues of quality aside*, I remember when the idea of writing an entire novel struck me as impossible. I didn't believe I could ever eat that elephant, not all in one go. And of course, I can't. Nobody can. But I can eat it a bite at a time. It will have taken me about two months to produce this many words. It took me two months to produce the first novel. Eight more of these (that's sixteen months, or just under another year and a half at my current rate of production), and I'll have written a million words, just in novels. That's the legendary "million words of crap" They say you have to produce before you can start writing anything worthwhile.
And that doesn't count the short stories I've produced in the last year, or all the other fiction writing I've done over the years. Of which I like to think that at least some of which counts against my million words. So I'm very pleased to be so close to the end of this novel.
*As for quality...about halfway through my day today my mood changed. I had been slogging through the writing feeling decidedly uninspired...when suddenly I saw a way to tie the final section of the novel back into one of the earlier scenes. I can bring back a couple of minor characters to help with the resolution of the final conflict. And as I write about that just this moment, it occurs to me that that is a perfect example of something I've read about the nature of "inspiration". Which is, that inspiration didn't come to me like a bolt out of the blue while I was daydreaming, or doing chores, or watching television. It came to me while I was standing at my desk, writing. If I hadn't been actively working on the story, and actively trying to improve it, that idea never would have occurred to me.
So I'm happier with the novel again. (But, as usual, that's ultimately irrelevant. It's the process--stand and write (or sit and write) consistently, whether I feel inspired or not--that is what makes it possible to finish the story. I'll let my inner critic out of his cage in a couple of weeks, when the first draft is done. But not yet.)
Stories in Circulation: 11
Rejections: 39
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 0
Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 4 queries out
Novel Rejections: 6
Project 1: Starship Repo Man (Tentative Title: Nine Tenths of the Law)
Words Written: 88,098
Issues of quality aside*, I remember when the idea of writing an entire novel struck me as impossible. I didn't believe I could ever eat that elephant, not all in one go. And of course, I can't. Nobody can. But I can eat it a bite at a time. It will have taken me about two months to produce this many words. It took me two months to produce the first novel. Eight more of these (that's sixteen months, or just under another year and a half at my current rate of production), and I'll have written a million words, just in novels. That's the legendary "million words of crap" They say you have to produce before you can start writing anything worthwhile.
And that doesn't count the short stories I've produced in the last year, or all the other fiction writing I've done over the years. Of which I like to think that at least some of which counts against my million words. So I'm very pleased to be so close to the end of this novel.
*As for quality...about halfway through my day today my mood changed. I had been slogging through the writing feeling decidedly uninspired...when suddenly I saw a way to tie the final section of the novel back into one of the earlier scenes. I can bring back a couple of minor characters to help with the resolution of the final conflict. And as I write about that just this moment, it occurs to me that that is a perfect example of something I've read about the nature of "inspiration". Which is, that inspiration didn't come to me like a bolt out of the blue while I was daydreaming, or doing chores, or watching television. It came to me while I was standing at my desk, writing. If I hadn't been actively working on the story, and actively trying to improve it, that idea never would have occurred to me.
So I'm happier with the novel again. (But, as usual, that's ultimately irrelevant. It's the process--stand and write (or sit and write) consistently, whether I feel inspired or not--that is what makes it possible to finish the story. I'll let my inner critic out of his cage in a couple of weeks, when the first draft is done. But not yet.)
Stories in Circulation: 11
Rejections: 39
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 0
Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 4 queries out
Novel Rejections: 6
Project 1: Starship Repo Man (Tentative Title: Nine Tenths of the Law)
Words Written: 88,098