Day twenty six: Target wordcount: 100000 (finished). Words written: 98750 (finished)

And as expected, a few little bombs go off in the last couple of chapters where two characters I had further plans for have written themselves out of the story by going and getting themselves killed. All very noble but not what I had in mind when I was planning the third book, thanks. One of them dies so well that I don’t think any amount of rewriting is going to resurrect him. The other one might yet get written back to life. It’s a bit of a convenient resolution to a love-triangle that’s likely to get re-written out in the first place. My chief antagonist has also completely stolen this story from my Chief Protagonist. I can see him in his little actor’s chair just off the set at the end, sharing a spliff with the Chief Sidekick who’s also been out steal every scene he’s in, arguing over which one of them will get best award for the Best Supporting Character.

This story is very different in almost every detail to the one I set out to write. It has the same general setting, but a good chunk of it occurs in a place I didn’t even know existed when I started. Characters I thought would be significant have faded into not very much and might yet get written out entirely. Other characters who were supposed to be supporting cast have jumped out of the page. My Chief Protagonist may be the sun around which the other characters orbit like planets, but as with the real world, it turns out that provided that the sun is there, the planets are much more interesting.

Now I’m done, it’s obvious that three things nearly tripped me up. Over-ambitious (and unnecessarily ambitious) planning – I cannot write meaningful chapters while wedged into a small hotel room with talkative small children and CBBC, nor was there any need to try. A day blown by a hangover (but I had a contingency day at the end, so that was OK). And then there’s the “love triangle” (which isn’t quite what it is, but is as good a way as any of trying to describe. You’ll recognise it’s essence: Hero has been missing presumed dead for several years. Best friend falls in love with wife and vice versa. Hero appears all unexpectedly. Which way does everyone jump? No entire movies have been dedicated to this as their entire plot, to stuffing something like that in as a minor sub-plot doesn’t fly. During this draft, I didn’t know which way each character would jump. I wanted to see what they did when they were put on the spot, but unfortunately what they mostly did was dither and wring their hands, and that dithering fed onto the page. It doesn’t work with the rest of this story. There are in fact two instances of something very roughly like this, the first being the falling out I had with the muse around 35000 words. In hindsight, all dithering has to go. I know how those relationships are going to work now and the principle job of the first rewrite will be to sort that out. It would have been an easier ride if I’d done that before I started.

Day twenty five: Target wordcount: 100000. Words written: 94900

Damn characters keep talking to each other instead of getting on with it and fighting. However, all is now set for the climax of the endgame. Will it be finished by the end of tomorrow, as it is supposed to be? Touch and go. It helps that the four-chapter end sequence has now reduced itself to a half-page epilogue around an entirely different character, the planned end sequence having been aborted due to the necessary character managing to be in completely the wrong place by now. In a way it was a sort of post-credits sequence designed to put a character from the climax in peril again for a cliff-hanger ending, and since I’ve already got a character in quite a lot of peril away from the final climax, I think I’ll stick with that.

This is the third time I’ve set out to say something about naming characters and so this time I’m going to do it right before some distracts – oooh! Squirrel!

Names matter a lot to me. Not that I claim to be at all good at them, but names shape the characters that wear them. If there’s one thing I have to get right in the very first draft, it’s the names for all the main characters. I’ve tried all sorts of ways around this, and none of them work. Names are part of what defines a character for me, and one of the very most importantest things of the first draft is to get the characters sorted out so they can all be very clear with me about what they will and won’t do. I’ve tried placeholder names. I’ve called characters Billious Bob and Fractious Frank and maybe it’s not surprise that didn’t work out too well. Other things have come closer to the mark. In one story (still a work in progress), the lead character was called Ezio for a while. Names do get changed in the first draft sometimes as I think of something that works better for a character who’s not yet fully defined. Generally, though, by the end of the first act, the names are what they will be forever. When I’ve thought of a name I like better for a character and tried to change it late in the rewrites, the character’s behaviour starts to change to. Weird but there it is.

Day twenty four: Target wordcount: 95000. Words written: 88400

Fight scenes fought, big revelation about the Chief Antagonist revealed, characters all properly re-united, damsel-in-distress held captive (sort of, except this she’s a he). Calm before storm calmed, navel’s contemplated, loins girded and here it comes. The endgame is here and everything from here on in is a straight ride to the final showdown and the little twist of lemon that comes after. No more bucking and turning the plot now. Final word length is expected to be bang on the nail, and all is fine and good with the world apart from the fact that I was supposed to finish tomorrow and now I’m not at all sure that I’ll even get to the end this week. Oh, I suppose maybe, if I spend the next two days not playing Skyrim at all. I was good today. A half-hour break and then back to work. I do like it how I keep getting in trouble with the town guard for, well, for shouting in a built up area after dark, basically.

I’m often tempted at this point to jack in the first draft and go back to the start and get on with the rewrites. As noted throughout these posts, there’s a list as long as a spiral galaxy’s arm of things that aren’t right and need sorting out or changing or ditching or remoulding and I keep on saying rewrites, that’s what rewrites are for. And the reason I do that and don’t go back and make changes is that there’s a good chance that whatever I rewrite because of what’s happened by the end of act one I’ll have to rewrite again at the end of act 2, and I’m a lazy sod who doesn’t want to rework the same passages more times than he absolutely has to. At this point, though, this great long list of niggles is, indeed, niggling me. I can see the end now. It’s as clear as day. There are no more surprises waiting. There’s no need to finish before going back. Go back NOW and sort it all out while it’s as clear and fresh in my head as it can be and I remember everything!

It’s sorely tempting. A couple of characters and a couple of relationships have morphed between the start of the book and the end, and where they’ve ended up is fine and better than my original plan, but the morphing has to go. Things that should have been stable for a long time need to stably be the way they ended up right from the start. Things that are evolving need to, er… well evolve rather than appear out of nowhere. Bits of world history and culture that have shown up need to have been present from the start. I want to start on this now. NOWWW!!!
I’m not going to though and for two reasons. First one is a morbid fear of finishing that I think some writers have too. It feels much easier to go back and rewrite now than to finish, and it would feel like that on the rewrite too, and this way lies the road to a very polished 85% of a novel, which sod all use to anyone. I shall not allow myself this fear, but push on through it, possibly with the aid of much ice cream. It’ll get better again somewhere around 90-95% complete. Experience tells me this.

And the other reason is that, no matter how obviously clear the passage to the endgame and the end itself may seem, there’s always just a chance that some character or other will let off a bomb in the last few chapters. Experience tells me this one too, and I’d rather only clean up once.

Apparently the paperback of The Order of the Scales has been reprinted. It almost feels like a reward for good behaviour

Day twenty three: Target wordcount: 90000. Words written: 81000

Saga-grade migraine. Epic word-fail. Not going to be making this up by the end of the week.

Day twenty two: Target wordcount: 85000. Words written: 80100

Also, why does the auto-complete function on my word-processor want to complete this as thistlefinger? I don’t think I have EVER written the word thistlefinger. Is it even a real word? OpenOffice seems to think so, but WTF, word-processor? W.T.F? Although as a name, Thistlefinger has a certain something? Thistlefinger McDark.

(For posterity, it’s just possible I may be writing this somewhat under the influence).

Right. Anyway. Sort of back on track after acceptance of the futility of trying to write useful words while stuck in a small hotel room with two small children and Scooby Doo. The fact that half of today’s words were written on the tube on the way to a party (and this is written on the way back, which will doubtless explain many, many things when I come back and read it sober) is a pleasing re-assurance that the last few days were a glitch, an asking-too-much. Today’s words were much, much better than the weekend. Another chapter and a half done, the ending is clearly going to change and the square-jawed hero’s nerdy sidekick has effectively completed his take-over of the story. Fighting his battles with brains instead of brawn and winning quite a lot of them. I think maybe he’s not going to win this one though. Ah well. My antagonist is showing some decent tortured depth too, trapped between what he once was and what he’s now supposed to be. I’m looking forward to writing more tomorrow so I guess the muse is properly back.

Why am I doing this? (Why am I doing thistlefinger? Dear god how do I make it stop)? Several reasons. I almost have to get this drafted in a month to meet the schedule I’ve put on myself, but that’s a bit of a cheat. It wouldn’t be the end of the world for it to overrun by a couple of weeks or even a month, as long as I used the rest of the time on something else. But it does need to be done. So that’s reason the first. Second reason: I want to see if I can. I want to see how hard it is. I want to know what it’s like for everyone who sits down at the start of November for NaNoWriMo with a blank sheet of computer screen and tried to write a novel. Here I am, supposedly a seasoned professional full-time writer with 5-6 hours every weekday. Can I actually do it? I want to know. Reason the third is closely related: sometimes there are reasons why a novel has to be written and edited and printed in an unusually short space of time (i.e. 4-5 months instead of the more usual couple of years). Movie and video-game tie-in novels spring to mind. I’ve been close to doing a video-game tie-in project once, and the time scales for that would have been murderous. From memory, I was going to have two months to come up with a story, write it, rewrite it and submit it for editing. That project fell through, but I want to know if I can do that. If I can, I want my agent to know I can do that and I want my publisher to know it too.

That’s why I’m doing this, but not why I’m writing about it. In part I want to come back and look at these records a few months from now and see if I can learn anything useful to make my own writing better – perhaps not the final words, but the process of getting there. Most of all, though, I guess I’m hoping that these notes might be useful for anyone else who embarks one the same. Maybe some of the thoughts on planning. Maybe the fact that I’ve hit a few rocks on the way, and why. I hope so. Be about 10,000 words gone into these posts by the time I’m done. You can figure out how many days of work that is for yourselves.

Much fighting planned for tomorrow. Fight scenes are good. I get excited and type faster. Seriously, that is true.

Day twenty: Target wordcount: 80000. Words written: 77400

I thought I was quite good at writing in almost any environment, but I appear to have found my limit. Ladies and gentlemen, if I have one very specific piece of advice to offer, it is this; just don’t even try when sharing a small and cramped hotel room with two hyperactive young boys for a few days.

No, actually, a second piece of advice, which I shall write large on the wallpaper of my laptop for the next week: be ambitious, but don’t be a dumbass.

Day twenty: Target wordcount: 78000. Words written: 76500

I broke my own rules today, wrote another thousand words and then threw them away and watched some of Epic Movie instead. Since it quickly became clear that nothing in the world and space that I could possibly ever write, even if I closed my eyes and mashed the keyboard with my face while being trepanned, could possibly be as bad as Epic Movie, I feel slightly better about the morning’s disaster.

Day nineteen: Target wordcount: Still 76000. Words written: 76500

One chapter today and it’s a total shambles. My scattered characters are mangled into the same place at the same time by hitting them with a crowbar. Oh, they all have good reason to be in roughly the same place at the same time but at the moment it’s a bit like they’ve all got tickets to a U2 gig and miraculously they all have good signal on their mobiles and Twitter hasn’t borked and they actually find each other without resorting to signal flares. Not sure if this is really the worst chapter I’ve written yet in this book or whether it only feels that way after the way the middle act ran towards the end.

In case it seems like I simply don’t care when I write what I know to be a pile of steaming of poo, I’ve written about the “vomit” draft before.

Never stop. Never look back. Ever onward!

Day eighteen: Target wordcount: Still 74000. Words written: 74100

Greetings from the Jorvik viking festival. Another chapter written, a long one this time that has suddenly pitched me to the end of the second act and left me staring at the third. The secondary protagonist has sprung a trap and now stares ashen-faced at the consequences. There’s some noodling about fate and destiny which at the moment feels like noodling and will thus not survive the rewrites.

When writing fantasy, I find that some research into the real history of a roughly equivalent period of real history is helpful even when it’s a period I think I know quite well. I don’t mean for the big sweep of events, the politics, the intrigues, the new technologies and how they changed the societies around them. Although that’s all interesting stuff too (if you’re me), I like to have done that before I even start. If I were to set something like the arrival of gunpowder or the printing press into the background of the story,  I can’t imagine not wanting to explore the consequences of this change as a major thread of the story, and so I ought to know as much as I need to before I even start. Not that every alternate world needs to reflect the real one in every step, but I’m not sure why I’d have something like gunpowder (say) show up without wanting to examine its consequences, and I’d feel I needed to understand what, for example, the real world consequences were and why the impact in China was quite different to that seen in Western Europe (and you could write a book about just that, I reckon).

What I mean are the little things. How did they light fires, what materials did they use to make clothes, how did they clean themselves. Trivia, really. The sort of thing that the knowing of would never have much impact on the plot, but make a world come alive, except finding out about them in this first draft give them the one chance to change my story after all.

Also, if nothing else, they give me something to write about for half a page if I get stuck. For the next few days, I’m going to be deluged by vikings. If you find the odd half-page of viking trivia in something of mine in the next couple of years, now you know why.

Day seventeen: Target wordcount: Still 72000. Words written: 72200

Another chapter done and my secondary characters continue to show off. Most books I write end up this way. The lunatics take over the asylum.

I’m at an easy time where I know exactly roughly what’s going to happen for at least the next chapter so tomorrow ought to be straightforward enough too. The rewrites will have to smooth out the way the spotlight of attention jumps too abruptly among the characters who weren’t supposed to get this much (I guess it’s their way of getting attention). I’m still worried about total wordcount too, but from where the story has reached, a lot of what I had planned for the last third of the book is looking like superfluous noodling about that can be easily cut. In the first draft, noodling deserves to die. Always. All of it. If some noodling aids the pacing or atmosphere, rewrite it in later, but it probably doesn’t otherwise it would feel like a significant development of the story and not like noodling. It looks very very likely that the ending is going to look something like the one I originally intended, and the characters on whom the next synopsis hangs will still be alive and with all the necessary physical and mental capacities. Not quite the home stretch yet, but I can see it in the distance.

Today is weekly backup day. In part that’s because I’m off for a few days to the Jorvik festival, which ought to put me in the right mood for writing about vikings hitting each other lots, should that happen to be in any way relevant. There will probably be a short pause in the daily mutterings while I spend three days in a hotel room with two small children. Any words that get done will be an unexpected bonus. As will any shreds of sanity that I still have when I return.

I’ve never had a total catastrophic system failure and I am absolutely sure that the moment I get slack about backing things up, it’s just waiting to catch me. I usually keep two copies of every working document which I save regularly while I’m working on them. Does that sound stupid? The last time I had a two hour session at the keyboard without doing that was April last year. It ended with the battery running out and the laptop dying – which should have been fine and hardly damaging at all thanks to Autosave, except that the power failed right in the middle of the Autosave and corrupted it and that was the end of that. Session gone. And that was unreasonably annoying. A couple of hours isn’t that big a deal, but it damn well felt like it at the time.

I’ve seen systems clap out and die in an unrecoverable mess. Or even a recoverable one if you don’t mind pulling out the hard drive and wiring it up to a different machine, but that’s a tedious enough thing to have to do. I’ve also seen backup devices that have seemed perfectly fine when sending files to them, only to discover that they’re somehow borked and can’t be read from (how does that work, world? HOW?) Looking at it now, even an external backup once a week seems pitiful. I could loose 25000 words. I would be hellish to be around until I’d written them back. If that had happened to me a dozen books ago, I would probably have lost the will to live.

Back Up Your Shit, People.