Progress is a Good Thing

1544 words today. It looks like my reworking of the outline yesterday paid off in a big way. I also decided not to cut back right now, but made extensive notes on what I wanted to change in the last couple scenes to make my new stuff work, then continued on from where I left off. As it turns out, the scenes I wrote today are ripe with conflict, set up some very cool stuff, and will make the coming death of a character all the more painful (emotionally). In other words, I'm once again excited about the story and where it's headed, and I actually enjoyed today's writing stint. Some unexpected things happened, and what I had planned for just one scene grew into two powerful scenes. Especially the second one. (Boy is my arm hurting from all this patting myself on the back.)

I broke the 400 page mark today. Almost there. If there aren't anymore snags and my new plan works, the rest of the book should start picking up speed now. With the way I have the numbers figured, I've got about 120 some pages left to go for this draft. And man am I going to celebrate when I've finished.

Ugh

It looks like the last 100 pages of this book are going to kill me. For every step forward, some new-fangled problem pops up and shoves me back. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut a lot of the progress I made yesterday to mesh with the plotting changes I spent obsessing over today. Turns out certain key things I had in the outline were not sufficiently motivated. I think I've untangled the mess, but I'm not sure I'll know for certain until I start writing again. You know, the whole point of outlining is to avoid crap like this. It's this kind of mess that's killed several earlier projects of mine. I just wish I could work this out and finish the dang book. I'm so...damn...close.

Tomorrow we shall test drive my new plans and see if they work.

2359 Words

Very happy with today's word-count. And I'm mere pages from the 400 mark, too. Only about 100 pages more to go (finally). Though there's a Big Scene coming up and I'm not sure it will work as I have it planned. I'm hoping something will come to me by the time I reach the scene. Sometimes that strategy works--don't worry about it till you get there. Sometimes I find if I just keep writing, the answer comes to me. Sometimes.

Guess we'll see.

It's good to be back to writing

It's also good to be out of 20 degree weather and back to the mid 70s.

I did write a bit yesterday, but not much worth mentioning. Today I got 1545 words, though. Feels good, too. I think the scene's working. As you may have noted, I did not finish the book before the New Year. I wasn't able to get much writing done while I was out of town. But now that I'm getting back to the old routine, things should go a bit smoother. I'm going to finish this damn book before the end of the month even if it cripples me. There's really no foreseeable reason why I can't do it. But notice I added the word foreseeable in there just to be safe.

Hope everyone's writing and life is going well. Let's hear it for a new year! I'm praying 2003 is a lot better than 2002. (I'd like to forget most of 2002 even happened.)