My First Hour And A Half
Thu 2004-12-09 09:24:43 (in context)
- 50,011 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 1.50 hrs. revised
Wow. Not a heck of a lot of novel gets edited in an hour and a half. I got through about... three pages. Three well-marked pages, and lots of accompanying mustn't forgets in my notebook.
I have realized that A) the first scene in my novel sucks, but B) it has to stay, so C) I may end up utterly rewriting it.
This must be why the fate of so many 1950s-era story drafts was to end as a crumpled-up ball on the floor. Not unlike the fate of several clinically depressed writers, sadly enough.
Well, more tomorrow. I'll be getting on a plane and heading off to Seattle. Which is fortunate, because the first scene in this novel involves a plane taking off at Seatac. I mustn't forget to notice exactly how the preflight briefing speech goes, exactly what Seatac's geographical relationship to Seattle is (with reference to I-5), and exactly how (and whether) the name of that aiport town is supposed to be punctuated. ("Sea-Tac"? "Seatac"? "SeaTac"? Er...)
In a way, that means my vacation is a paid vacation. I would be more jolly about that fact if I knew I actually would get paid, of course. But, as noted in the previous entry, you don't get contracted pre-novel until after you've novelled pre-contract. Whee!
In other news, I've started working on the definitive PDF template for archiving Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories. And I finally got a working cron job in place on that site and scheduled to prune the deleted items list every morning at five past midnight. Yes, it's procrastination, but it's productive procrastination, so shut up.