First Edition.
Per my status bar to the left, I'm 16% complete with Sunstone book 1. Will I ever finish? Maybe by October if I keep at a 2,000 words per day pace.
But 2,000 words a day is tough. It takes several hours and leaves me with no time to do anything but type it all into my computer at the end of the day before I go to bed.
So, I'll ramble some here now about my writing and how it's going.
Most days I do pretty good at getting to my minimum goal. The best day I had was August 2 when I wrote 3,330 words in one day. That was an amazing output. The least productive day I had was last friday with a sum total of 130 words.
Yes, you read that right. There's no comma.
I really hate what I've written and it's all I can do to keep myself from just scrapping the project entirely. I know I'll never get published with it. If I ever get published at all with anything I ever write. There are all these chapters here at the beginning that really just go nowhere. And I want to erase it all and try to figure out how to salvage any of it. There are key plot points that come out in these chapters. These chapters are the beginning of my villain's plans picking up steam and coming to a head. (My villain's plans have been in motion for a long time before the book ever starts which is how I justify to myself starting where I do in the whole storyline.)
For the most part, my chapters are 4K-5K+ long. I have one chapter that deals with my MC that is really short at the moment, but I figure that will change in revisions. What's nice about these early chapters is I'll be able to rearrange them as needed when the time comes without much revision to keep timelines straight.
But it is seriously all I can do to keep from deleting all nearly 20,000 words I've written so far this month and just moving on to a different project. I want to just finish the stupid book, say I finished a novel, and move on.
All other WiPs are on backburner. Except one. My poetry collection, Painted Silence, is out in a contest pool. The deadline for entries is Saturday and the judge will begin reading all entries next week, I'm assuming.
The judge is poet Mark Doty, if anyone knows his work. The winner will be notified in November. So come December, I'll either have a poetry collection ready to be published or I'll be shoving it in a dark corner where no one will ever see it again.
Hey, I've had days where my word count is negative because I deleted so much. I had one day where I wrote 9 words. One sentence. Sometimes that's all you can do. At least it's something.
ReplyDeleteOh I feel your pain. There are many, many, many times I jsut want to delete the whole file and be done. There are days that I wrote 0 word, days I'm in the negative from deletions and days that I kick my word counts butt. It's a struggle.
ReplyDeleteI did think yesterday would become a 0 word count day.
ReplyDeleteI know that it wouldn't take me as long to write each day if I just wrote in the computer right off the bat, but I like longhand because it keeps me from editing constantly.
Was it Hemingway or Faulkner who said he wrote one good sentence in a given day and when someone asked how many bad sentences he wrote that day he said none?
I like longhand, too! I think everyone has felt like scrapping it all at one time or another. Good luck with the poetry thing. You'll have to let us know what happens!
ReplyDeleteSounds like you're making great progress. I know how you feel about the cruddy first draft. It takes a lot of will power not to go for the delete button some days. I'm trying to think of it as an enormous puzzle and hoping that maybe one day I'll get all of the pieces into the proper place. There's probably a few pieces in there that got mixed in from another puzzle so I'll have to toss those when I find them...
ReplyDeleteGood luck with the poetry contest! And with sorting out your puzzle pieces!
Thanks, guys. Soon as I know anything about the contest I'll let you know.
ReplyDelete(Which will either be squeals of glee when I hear that I've won or a post on December 1 saying that the winner would have been notified and I never heard anything.)
By coincedence, I have just read an article today that states, if you don't like what you are writing, how can you expect your readers to enjoy reading it. It made me think,phew I am enjoying this, so that is good so far.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you were to get a buddy reader to look at it before you scrap those valuable words. It may only take a tweak for you to love it again. I could not bear for you to bin all that valuable time and energy. Good Luck by the way.
I am enjoying what I'm writing, but it's just utter crap and I am very tempted to scrap it all at this point.
ReplyDeleteBut I won't. Sigh. Thanks for the encouragement Glynis.