Thursday, February 28, 2008

On A Roll

I hit 65,000 words in my newest MS last night. While I don't adhere strictly to word counts, I like for my novels to be around 80,000 words and my short stories to be about 4,000. So what does 65,0000 words do for me? Well, it tells me that it's time to start bringing things to a head. 10,000 words of steadily building conflict and then about 5,000 of resolution.

I tried not to rewrite while I was still doing the first draft, but I realized I'd fallen back on my usual bad habit of compartmentalizing the set-up of the story and the conflict, so I moved the timeline up on the conflict and interspersed it with the rest so that the pace is better and it flows. (And I'm sure none of that made sense to anyone except me.)

Anyway, it feels as if this story is falling together so quickly, but in reality, I've been working on it since December. I don't keep good track of when I begin and end a project. Maybe I should. Then maybe I'd figure out how to schedule my time a little more efficiently.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think that's very fast. Do you really think three months is a long time to work on a novel? The original draft of my first was quick--probably 2 months, but the second book took forever (although I put it down for long periods of time). I can't even seem to get a handle on the third so, 3 months sounds pretty damn good to me. And, as always, you know where to find me when the deed is done!

D. L. King