Day 6:

The first act is finished.

No it wasn’t.

About a third of the planned second act has vanished in a smoking hole of unexpected narrative decisions, but on the whole, it’s not too bad.

Yes. Well. Little did the author know how far his narrative would stray from his plan in the second act at this point . . .

It has a prologue, of course because all my stories have prologues, almost none of which survive the editor.

Both still true.

Just for fun I’ve given the second act a prologue too, and that probably won’t survive either.

Well yes, when we finally get to the second act, the prologue is still there.

This is a first draft, though, so some serious pruning during the rewrite is to be expected.

No, this lot survived largely unscathed. As opposed to . . .

Days 7 and 8

In which chapters are set in a series of underground grottos and on a snow-covered mountainside, and if all of that has nothing to do with an evening back on Skyrim and then getting six inches of snow overnight and spending most of the afternoon throwing snowballs at each other, then my secret identity is Chairhead from The Tick.

and

It’s tempting to throw the whole lot away. Certainly the bit where someone builds a snowman in order for someone else to shoot a it a few pages later and thus trigger an avalanche that wipes out a whole bunch of people needs a serious slap in the face with a haddock.

Yeeesss . . . It’s nice to know that I saw how preposterout the whole avalanche scene was even back then.

I’ve written enough novels now to know that it takes, on average, about an hour to write one thousand words in the first draft and about half an hour in the first rewrite, maybe twenty minutes in the second and a little less for any that follow. What matters is the on average part of that statement. So, in theory, what happens now is that I’ve worked how many hours this rewrite will take (about fifty) and carved that up so that I’m working on it for ten days, five hours a day and then it’s all done. Thus is the plan. So the idea is that I work on the rewrite for five hours every day and never mind how many words I cover each day, since on average it should all work out fine in the end. I’m not supposed to be trying to cover tent thousand words every day, I’m supposed to be working for five hours. On some days I’ll cover fifteen thousand and on others I’ll cover five und so weiter etc. and so on. And because it’s all on average it’ll all balance in the end and when there’s a slow day, I won’t get hung up on it because I know that. Right? RIGHT?

And I’m sure it would work fine if I did it like that and didn’t stop every day bang on ten thousand words and go oooh! An hour early! Time for another couple of levels of Prey then!

Or alternatively it would work fine if I didn’t hit chapters I’ve left for myself like the one with the stupid avalanche. It’s possible that the next few updates may get a bit ranty on the subject of avalanches. Stupid avalanches.

So now I’m behind. Meh. Yet another level of Prey then. Surely that will help . . .