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lauraanne_gilmanLizard brain and mammal brain just got together to do something quite clever, structurally. They're rather annoyingly pleased with themselves.
*pets them both, hands out treats, then lashes them back to the keyboard*
[pauses to let some fresh air in, and meander a bit while brain tissue breathes]
I don't keep exact track, but I'm thinking I've done about 8,000 words on TNS since Monday. I expect to put in another few before Sunday night comes 'round, so call it a rough 10,000. And that includes taking Thursday off. Not record-breaking by any standards. But not bad. If I can continue this until the end of the year, I'll be able to take a few weeks off to write the promised story for an anthology before I start running up against external deadlines and other Life Responsibilities.
I'm usually a pretty steady writer -- a thousand in a workday* is good, fifteen hundred is very good, and anything more than twenty-five hundred means I was rockin' and rollin. But there's a price to be paid for a high word count - it means that I'm not stopping to check facts, or block a scene, or chase down some detail I really need for that particular moment. And that can be good -- the story's ready to be told - and it can be bad -- I'll need to go back and fix broken things later that might impact later work already done.
I'm pretty sure the former's the case here. There's very little authorial angsting with this book -- I'm not worrying about multiple book worldbuilding continuity, cross- and inter-arc character development, or trying to keep any one of the three subplots from hijacking the entire book and still getting them all tied up by the end. Just sitting back, putting the various characters through hell, and having myself some fun.
Of course, when I finish the rough draft and go back with my side-jotted notes to tidy and tighten everything up before the editor gets it, that may not be so much fun. But I knew the job was crazy-making when I signed up....
(That's not to say that writing the Retrievers books isn't fun. It's just a different, slightly more complicated and agony-making sort of fun, is all.)
* mileage varies, but when I count words, it's not the total written, but the total I have kept when I save-and-close.
*pets them both, hands out treats, then lashes them back to the keyboard*
[pauses to let some fresh air in, and meander a bit while brain tissue breathes]
I don't keep exact track, but I'm thinking I've done about 8,000 words on TNS since Monday. I expect to put in another few before Sunday night comes 'round, so call it a rough 10,000. And that includes taking Thursday off. Not record-breaking by any standards. But not bad. If I can continue this until the end of the year, I'll be able to take a few weeks off to write the promised story for an anthology before I start running up against external deadlines and other Life Responsibilities.
I'm usually a pretty steady writer -- a thousand in a workday* is good, fifteen hundred is very good, and anything more than twenty-five hundred means I was rockin' and rollin. But there's a price to be paid for a high word count - it means that I'm not stopping to check facts, or block a scene, or chase down some detail I really need for that particular moment. And that can be good -- the story's ready to be told - and it can be bad -- I'll need to go back and fix broken things later that might impact later work already done.
I'm pretty sure the former's the case here. There's very little authorial angsting with this book -- I'm not worrying about multiple book worldbuilding continuity, cross- and inter-arc character development, or trying to keep any one of the three subplots from hijacking the entire book and still getting them all tied up by the end. Just sitting back, putting the various characters through hell, and having myself some fun.
Of course, when I finish the rough draft and go back with my side-jotted notes to tidy and tighten everything up before the editor gets it, that may not be so much fun. But I knew the job was crazy-making when I signed up....
(That's not to say that writing the Retrievers books isn't fun. It's just a different, slightly more complicated and agony-making sort of fun, is all.)
* mileage varies, but when I count words, it's not the total written, but the total I have kept when I save-and-close.
