Day ten: Target wordcount: 50000. Words written: 49900

A tad annoying to have missed hitting 50k words today, since that’s supposed to be the halfway point. I have no idea whether it actually is. The various deviations from plan seem to have added a whole new chunk in the middle of the story, which may or may not make up for the chunk that got lost when Chief Antagonist decided to make up his own plot. I’m still going with the change of direction from a couple of days ago and that still seems to work, so there’s still a major rewrite of the first third of the book required. It’s tempting to go back and do it now, but I won’t, and the main reason for that is that I had no idea whether the story will later veer off in another unexpected direction. I’ve a few one-line notes on the major changes that need to be woven in just to catch my current thoughts, but no revisions, not yet. It’s been a bit of a hard lesson to learn over what’s now pushing twenty manuscripts if you include all the unpublished stuff, but that really is what works best for me these days. There was a time when the first draft was when all the wonder happened, exploring a whole new story without quite knowing how it was going to end, but that’s been changing over the years. Yes, the first draft still nails down the arc of the story and all its waypoints, but the revisions are now when the characters and the world spring into life and I’ve come to enjoy that part rather more. It didn’t used to be this way, but I’ve heard several other ’seasoned’ authors say the same. I wonder whether it’s a general truism. Not that it really matters.

Two chapters done today, possibly with too much of the action in the first happening off-screen, while the second one definitely has a section that smacks of Skyrim withdrawal symptoms. I haven’t played for THREE WHOLE DAYS dammit. And I was thinking – I’ve never had a sequence in a story with an ancient vault/tomb with stuff-that-is-best-left-alone inside it, and then afterwards I remembered that The Black Mausoleum is pretty much about an ancient vault/tomb with stuff-that-is-best-left-alone inside it. You’d think, having quietly copy-edited that over the last couple of weeks, I might have remembered a bit sooner.

Anyhoo…  Today’s lesson is this: if you want to hit your wordcount for the day, turn Facebook off. And particularly do not get caught up in a discussion of old goth music with Gavin Smith and MD Lachlan, especially when it’s one of those days when Mark doesn’t actually seem to have any work to do and peppers his comments with Youtube links. Tappity-tappity-tappity – oooh a Sisters of Mercy clip – tappity-tappity-tappity – oooh! Bauhaus! Ooooooooh The Hunger! – tappity-tappity-tappity – oooh some band that no one has ever heard of! And another! And another! – tappity-tappity-tappity. For half the afternoon.