50k

I’ve passed the 50,000 word mark, though it happened later in the month than I would have liked.  My original goal was to get to 60,000 words this month, but with only five days left, that’s not happening.  I’m actually just short of 51,000 words right now, so I’m hoping to get to 55,000 by the end of the month.  That would put me at the half-way point.  Since I’m hoping to finish the draft by the end of the year, I would need to do a little more than 650 words per day starting October 1.  We’ll see.

Admitting weakness

I’ve hit another wall in the writing process (this last week/weekend was pretty unsuccessful — I’m going to fall wayyyyy short of my goal of 15,000 words for the month), and realized why.  I can’t write battle scenes.

I don’t know what it is, but I can’t write large-scale battles.  That was my last big hang-up, and it seems to be the current one.  Thankfully, this is the only other major battle in the book, so once it’s over, I’m done with that dilemma (at least until the next book).  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way around it, and I think I have it.

One of the main characters gets injured during the course of the fight (which is necessary to set up the next part of the plot), so I’m going to try to write the battle from his perspective.  I think this will be an easier way for me to write it — it will be more feeling/emotion based, which is a nice way to help develop his character, and it’ll be like a series of small conflicts — no need to describe large scale combat.

I feel it’s important to identify your strengths and weaknesses — not only does it provide you with an opportunity to work on your weaknesses, but it helps move you past the roadblocks that your weaknesses spring up.

So what are your weaknesses and how have you moved past or corrected them?

Apparently I need to go to work.

This past weekend, I took two days off to give myself a long weekend.  My expectation was that I’d spend the extra time writing and make some good headway.  Instead, I spent a lot of time staring at a computer screen with very few words coming out.  My grand total for the four-day weekend?  Just over 1,000 words (actually, that’s for three days — Saturday is my day “off” because I tend to be booked from morning to night).

Today, I went back to work.  Upon getting home, I fell right into my normal routine, including pounding out the words.  So far, I’ve written about 500 words and will probably get out 300-400 more tonight.  Apparently, going to work provides exactly the motivation I need to get the words out of my head.

Who’da thunk it?

Forgotten Characters

I’m coming to a point in the book where there are multiple conflicts between several of the main and secondary characters.  There’s just one problem.  I forgot about some of the characters.

The beginning of the book introduces the main characters, including all the characters involved in these conflicts.  After that, several of them just disappear.  The characters don’t have a major role in any of the main events that already happened, but they’re pivotal in the events to come.

Part of the problem is that there’s a disconnect between the characters and I.  This includes one of the main antagonists (there’s an intra-kingdom power struggle that occurs during a war — the power struggle doesn’t really occur until the second half of the book, and his role is ancillary at best in the first half).

It’s one of those things I just can’t believe happened — I got so wrapped up in some of the earlier events, but these characters still needed attention.  Now I’m finding that I have to go back and fill in these chapters — some of their backstory needs to come out before I can get to the conflicts, and the place that makes most sense to do it is earlier in the book.

I’m not sure if this was a planning failure (I’m not a huge fan of the chapter-by-chapter outline, just a more generalized “this is the order stuff is going to happen in outline”), or if it was just that the other characters were so insistent on telling me their story that it consumed my writing and the forgotten characters just couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

So here I am, going back into the first half of the book and adding additional material.  I don’t consider this a “revision-addition” (the sections that you add after you read the entire book and realize that you should spend more time on X), because its fairly essential to the unwritten portion of the book.  That said, I’m not going to worry too much about where I place them in the book — as long as they fits in the overall timeline — because I can always move these chapters around a little during the revision stage.

Before I can do any of that, however, I have to apologize to the characters and hope they’re still willing to share their tales.

My opening paragraphs

Several of the bloggers I read have posted their opening paragraph(s), including Diane Gallant, Ken Kiser, and Alex Moore (among many others that I would list here, but it would take a while).  I’ve decided to post mine (though I do note that this is the first draft, completely unedited).  Here are the first (roughly) 200 words:

            Alucius stabbed his pitchfork in the ground.  With a heavy sigh, he wiped his brow.  The sun was hidden behind the clouds, but the air, like his shirt, was soaked with humidity.  It would rain soon, good for the farms.  Of course, this meant that his work had to be finished before the drops began to fall from the sky.

            He picked the fork back up.  His broad, strong shoulders flexed under his ripped and dirty shirt as he turned the earth.  Alucius had been at this all day, and the hours seemed to drag by.  He was a farmer by necessity, but hated working the ground.

            His father had passed away a year ago.  He owned nothing but the farm, and had but one son to take it over.  Alucius’ mother and sisters were dependent upon him, and therefore he was dependent on the farm.  So from dawn to dusk he was out here, tilling, planting, weeding and toiling.

            Everyday, around noon, Alucius took a break.  He would eat whatever crumbs he had scrounged up that morning and look to the west.  There, he would see Haandor, the bejeweled city.  He’d always sigh and look wistfully.  The city always captured his dreams and consumed his waking thoughts.

Enjoy

Still plugging away…

I’ve been writing everyday over the last few days, like usual, but I haven’t been quite as productive as I would like.  I’m both a political junkie and a sports junkie, which has led to concentration issues this week.  Between the RNC and the start of the NFL season (not to mention my normal baseball habit), I’ve been more distracted than usual.  Add in a two hour continuing education class yesterday and a heavy week at work  (I love it when four projects that were “back burner” projects last week become “super high priority” projects this week, to go with the shortened work week), and you have a recipe for a slow week of writing.

Still, I’m making some progress and writing everyday.  That’s really what counts.  The words will come — I just have make sure I’m position to record them.

Goals

As I sit here waiting ever so faithfully for my laptop to finish charging (when you plug it in at night, it helps to make sure the cord is actually plugged into the wall), I’ve been thinking about my goals for the next month.  I’m hoping/expecting the next 30 days are extremely productive ones — I’ve been rolling recently, and don’t see a reason why this would stop.  To top it off, I’m taking off a couple of days this month (to go along with the fact that I’m off today), and with no major plans I expect to focus almost exclusively on my writing those days.

So I figure that I should be able to easily reach my base goal — 2,000-3,000 words per week (and plan on being on the higher side of those, so ~12,000 words for the month), plus, given three extra days of writing this month, I should be able to do 15,000 words in the next 30 days.  That’s an average of 500 words per day — nothing overly cumbersome.  So my first goal for the month is 15,000 words.  Depending on my progress during the month, I may add in a stretch goal, but that has yet to be seen.

My second goal is one that has been eluding me for quite some time — the title.  I have yet to come up with something that really strikes me as an appropriate title, but I also haven’t really spent time sitting down and really just thinking about it.  I’m not sure that I’ll be able to come up with even a working title this month, and that’s okay.  My goal, however, is to spend one hour each week thinking about it, even if nothing comes to fruition.