Day 1 of the Rest of My Life, Take 967
Sat 2010-01-09 22:01:14 (in context)
- 51,283 words (if poetry, lines) long
I'm sure I've used that as a blog title before. But, so? Every day is the first day of the rest of your life. You get do-overs.
Today was good. Only, writing two articles for Demand Studios takes at least forty-five minutes longer than it should. Right now, there are writers complaining in the DS forum about how few titles they're allowed to have in their queue at a time because they would like to write more than their current average of 60 articles in a week. I don't know how they do it. Seriously. It took me 3.25 hours just to write two. I guess if I worked 8 hours a day on nothing but DS articles, that's how I'd do 60 articles a week. But I don't want to. I've also got some 3rd-party blogging to do (oh hai Metaverse Tribune, I'm in ur Second Life bein kloo-less!). And, oh yeah, a novel draft to finish and short stories to revise and put in the mail.
In the end, today only about 1 hour of my 5 went to the novel. I spent it mostly making notes.
In the second half of November, I started jumping around the novel's chronology, mainly because I wanted to write the end of the book before the month was out. 50,000 words wasn't going to be a problem. The problem was how many words it took to get Melissa out of elementary school. NaNoWriMo philosophy holds that you should make 49,999 and 50,000 be "The" and "End" because you can't count on the momentum to keep itself rolling into December. Except skipping around the book in order to make that happen doesn't leave me all that much better off. I am missing a lot of material from Melissa's college years and beyond, and I don't even know what shape it's supposed to be.
So I've been rereading and taking notes as I go. Essentially, I've been performing Holly Lisle's One Pass Manuscript Revision method on an unfinished first draft. I'm hoping that by the time I get to the holes I'll have got enough of a sense of the big picture to know what goes into the holes. Hell, if I even recognize that I'm looking at a hole, I'll be in better shape than I think I am.
It's working so far. I got a glimpse of the rough shape of Melissa's crisis scene with the Ghost Prince. I think I might even be able to write it tomorrow. But I probably shouldn't, not until I've worked my way through the rough draft to that point. I am probably still missing necessary data. I can afford to put it off; I put in the first few sketchy brush strokes, so to speak, when I had that flash of "ah-ha!" and began typing into yWriter's notes field in the appropriate scene file. I can come back to it. I'll probably come back to it several times, filling in a brush stroke here and a brush stroke there until the whole avalanche comes down.
And now that I've thoroughly mixed my metaphors, I shall run off to the Sage Ocean before someone makes me clean up after myself. Whee!