Day sixteen: Target wordcount: Still 70000. Words written: 70200

Two and a half chapters and the so-called secondary characters are running the whole story now. My tip for the day is not to choose to do this in February, which has fewer days than any other month and also has a week-long half-term in the middle of it.

Anyway, it’s Valentine’s day so go do something Valentiny. If that’s not good enough, there’s a rant piece for The Order of the Scales wot I did over on Whatever.

Day fifteen: Target wordcount: Still 65000. Words written: 64900

Two long chapters today. In the first chapter, the minor sidekick and the character whose existence I had never even foreseen get married, rather to my surprise. I don’t know what’s going on here or where this is going to end, but it certainly wasn’t ever in the script. Maybe I have a secret discomfort at how white and male and testosterone this whole story was panning out to be, maybe that’s why the unplanned female protagonist and the ethnic minority character are making such a bid to steal the limelight. And now I say it like that, it sounds awful (Token woman? Check. Token racial minority? Check). I fail on the token old person and I haven’t even thought about the sexuality of most of the characters. They’re just assumed to be straight. I went through a period of worrying about that sort of thing quite a lot. Less now. Shoot me if you must for that.

It’s not that I don’t give a shit. The views of my characters are not necessarily my own doesn’t cut it for me – it may be true but the views of my characters are far from the whole story I’m telling, and if every character in my story views wasps as vile pests to be exterminated and that viewpoint is repeatedly validated within the story while others are either absent or are only there to be mocked and shown to be obviously foolish, why then the wasps might have a point when they swarm out of their nest and sting me a lot. However, it is also extremely difficult to provide a narrative that explores all possible attitudes to wasps with equal fairness while allowing for the inherent social bias against wasps (evil bastards), and if you then additionally aim to be treat butterflies, spiders, ladybirds, slugs, mosquitoes, moths and grasshoppers with the same importance then I rather fear that, if I happened to be writing a story that was largely supposed to be about spaceships, no one would buy it. I write within my limits. Small steps are better than none, after all.

The changes these two characters have wrought to my story in the first of today’s chapters are pleasing. The second of the day’s chapters was, sadly, an even bigger shambles than this post. Ah rewrites, how I love your healing ways.

Day fourteen: Target wordcount: Still 60000. Words written: 60150

Last weekend I was home alone with two boys. I wrote in the mornings when they thought I was still asleep and didn’t want to wake me up in case I found something more useful for them to do than play Skyrim. I wrote while one of them did his own thing and I was sitting with the other while he did a drawing for his homework. I did the day’s word count each day before bedtime and cooked proper meals with real ingredients and we went to swimming lessons and sledging and made snowmen and had snowball fights. I might say that sometimes, to be a writer, you have to be a Time Lord, but it has nothing to do with being a writer. To be a parent, you have to be a Time Lord, and how single parents who juggle all these things every single day manage to stay sane, I have no idea.

By comparison, catching up again this weekend was easy peasy lemon squeezy. Back to proper work again tomorrow.

Day thirteen: Target wordcount: Still 60000. Words written: 59100

This is why we all have days off, right? So we can catch up with all the work we were supposed to do on our days on? Right? Right?

One easy chapter today, essentially the story of a character from the first book in the series who hasn’t shown up yet. I’ve know for a while (for a few days at any rate) that he was coming in and what he’d be doing for the rest of the story, but it wasn’t planned from the start so at the moment, it sort of happens out of nothing. When the rewrites are done, his appearance will be telegraphed from a mile away.

I see I’m saying “but that’ll be sorted out in the rewrites” rather a lot. Truth is, a lot of it will. Truth is, the first draft isn’t quite the incoherent mess I might be making out to be either, but it usually has some quite jarring shifts in it – character relationships that suddenly change, revelations about the world or people or events that come out of nowhere. Rewrites make all that go away, and I rarely go back to change any earlier parts of a first draft because who’s to say that some still-unforseen shift won’t make me change them again. It’s wasteful. What I end up with are a page of notes that say things like ‘Maybe you should say something about the world being flat instead of round a little earlier than page 320″ and “If Square-Jawed Bob is going to make out with the Cthuloid alien later, maybe we should see some hint of his tentacle fetish beforehand, eh?”

Makes me think I should probably say something more about rewrites before the end of the month, but not today. Today I’m worrying about final word-length. See, Chromium is supposed to be around 100k words. I have a nasty feeling it might grow. There was a time when this didn’t matter too much, but these days it does. Another five thousand words doesn’t just mean another day writing the first draft, it means another day writing the second draft and the third and the fourth too. Another fifty thousand words ends up adding two months work to the whole process. In business terms, that’s like watching your own hourly pay-rate slowly dropping day by day thanks entirely to your own incompetence. OK, so I maybe don’t think of it like that except once a month when I do the accounts, but taking twice as long as an was intended to write one book means that another never gets to be born. There’s probably something to be said for keeping things as lean as possible in the first draft and fleshing them out a bit in the revisions, but I don’t seem to have mastered that.

Ho hum.

Day twelve: Target wordcount: 60000. Words written: 57200

Two difficult scenes with all four major characters making choices that very much define who they are today. I like the way it’s turned out, but I also spent four hours out of my available six finding all sorts of things to do that seemed like fine and worthy activities and conveniently meant I didn’t have to face these particular scenes for that little bit longer. Procrastination. It gets every one at some point or another. Still, they’re done now. Being behind on the word count doesn’t trouble me too much, since the weekend was nominally a couple of holiday days. Not any more.

Still no Skyrim. Did watch an amusing little lecture on shapeshifting dinosaurs though, and a chunk of the day was spent quite profitably fleshing out some ideas for a couple of other stories. I do find it useful to have more than one thing on the go at the same time. Up to a couple of days ago, I’ve also been doing copy-edits for The Black Mausoleum and I find something like that makes a good break. It’s quite a different discipline (I read the MS aloud to myself while being molested by cats and either accepting or rejecting all the copy-edit changes and perhaps making a few additional ones myself). It’s something of a sword with two edges – on the one hand I find it a good way to take a break without getting sucked away from the whole writing mojo. On the other hand, it’s another excuse for procrastination. I find it generally it works for me to have more then one thing on the go at once. For others, I have no doubt, it doesn’t work at all.

Anyway, some useful work on Michaela’s ravens occurred and then later we accidentally outlined a Victorian murder mystery with a paranormal undertow. I shall endeavour to catch up while on “holiday” over the next couple of days.

Day eleven: Target wordcount: 55000. Words written: 55000

Four . . . Days . . . Without . . . Skyrim . . . Must . . . Fight . . . More . . . Bandits . . . Must . . . Shout . . .

A brief aside: The Order of the Scales is just out in the UK in its small paperback form.This is my favourite cover from the UK editions. The Order of the Scales is also out in hardback in the US, and the King of the Crags is out in both France and the US in small paperback form. Nothing new here, but its a joy to have my name next to so many magnificent dragons

Back to the project: Facebook does not fit in when you have 5-6 working hours a day and are trying to write a novel in a  month. Sorry Facebook friends. I’ve just had a mail from my agent asking if I’m OK because I haven’t replied to a couple of mails, so it’s not just you.

Two more chapters done. Lots of fighting yesterday and this tomb business has sparked a whole pile of ideas about the world and its history that will mean yet more work in the revisions, and not only for this book (this being the second in a sequence). I always try to have the first draft of one book written before the one before come back from the editor, because this always happens – each story adds to the world and the characters as well as the storylines, and if at all possible, I like to put some of those ideas back into earlier books yo show hints of what will be coming later. Ideally I’d get a whole series drafted before submitting the first volume. That’s rarely practical, but at the very least I aim to have the first draft and first revision of the next book done before I get the previous MS back from my editor. I suppose I assume that most authors writing series aim for something similar, but it’s not something I’ve talked about much so I don’t know.

I didn’t quite finish a chapter last night, but left it hanging to finish today. I like to do this as noted before because it helps me to get back into the flow each day, but it has another advantage. Last night, one character was about to do something that I thought at the time was a no-brainer. This morning I’m not so sure. It makes them cross a line I’m not sure they’re ready to cross, and more particularly, I’m not sure that those around them are prepared for it either. So maybe instead they’ll walk up to that line and look at it long and hard and then walk away again. Not sure until I get to writing again, but sometimes it’s nice to pause before a character does something like this.

A day off is much in order soon.

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.

Day nine: Target wordcount: 45000. Words written: 45100

A day of things coming together rather nicely. It would appear that yesterday’s minor meltdown has taken the story in a much stronger direction. Three full chapters and the start of a fourth, and I still don’t have anything better for why my chief antagonist isn’t dead other than The Plot Says So, but I’ll leave that thorn for the rewrites. Everyone is now off doing their own thing but it’s also clear how they can’t possibly leave each other in peace for long. In this regard, they’re rather like a collection of small children.

It’s been a long day today with a pile of copy-editing as well, hence a short post. I might easily have stopped 500 words earlier and been happy about it, but that would have been the end of a chapter. When the words are flowing I much prefer to stop in the middle of a chapter than at the end of one. This generally means I know exactly what I’m writing as soon as I sit down on the next day and makes it much easier to find my rhythm. If I have to start at he beginning of a new chapter then I find it much harder to get going. I’m sure there are other people who find the exact opposite.

Day eight: Target wordcount: 40000. Words written: 40100

Once upon a time, I built a gizmo with a couple of motors moving a mirror. A laser was supposed to shine at the mirror, which was inclined by forty-five degrees, so the laser came out orthogonal to the way it came in. The motors were partly to stabilise the mirror, but they were also supposed to put a couple of small sinusoids on the mirror so that the beam went in small circles and traced the path of a cone when it came out. In principle, when you turned the laser on at the top and held up a piece of paper to see what pattern the beam was tracing, what came out was supposed to be a circle.

What actually came out generally looked like a bird’s nest, and for a long time, this seemed like a Very Bad Thing, but in the end turned out to be so useful that several of us continue to claim to this day that we designed it that way On Purpose because we were That Clever, and it wasn’t a lucky accident at all, oh no.

So, anyway, the writing: Some days you tap on the door of the muse and out she comes, singing sweet songs and ready to dance all night. Other days you have to go in with a police battering ram and a couple of tear gas grenades, drag him out of a crack den and stick his head in a vice until he screams and then take those screams and use them, even if what you end up with makes Pirates of the Caribbean III look like a work of deep meaning with an intricately layered plot leading to a climax that is both spectacular and thoughtful. This has been one of those days. One major character has literally declared they’ve had enough and walked out. The scholarly sidekick now seems to think he’s Ozymandias from the Watchmen. And while it was quite fascinating how he disposed of the Chief Antagonist, I currently have no idea how he’s not actually y’know, totally dead and stuff and can’t come  back for, y’know, THE REST OF THE F***ING PLOT, MAYBE?

And yet.

I’d been planning to write a bit about why I’m actually doing this, but today’s little debacle strikes me as more informative. While the prose style of today’s writing is no different to that of the days before (that is to say, workmanlike and nothing to shout about – for me that’s fine and what rewrites are for), the narrative twists and turns, particularly relating to, well, basically all of my principle characters, are not. They are either much better and drive the story onto a much tighter track, or else I’ve completely disappeared up my own backside and at this point it’s quite difficult to tell which. One thing that is certain is that what I wrote today, in the context of what has gone before as it is currently written, is dire – a bunch of characters suddenly start start throwing their toys about without any particular warning or indeed, any particular indication that they had said toys to throw.

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. However, it’s also possible that the agonised screams of today’s very reluctant muse have been telling me something important about the passions of the main characters in this story. That they have been a bit mute thus far. Possibly twisting various characters around to set up for today’s scenes will add a tension and a darkness that’s been missing. Instinct says go with it and take the rewrite effort on the chin.

Sometimes when the muse howls, it means more than when she sings.

Day seven: Target wordcount: 35000. Words written: 35000

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 that of Chairhead from The Tick.

I am shagged. Worded out. Remember that thing where I said I scheduled in a few days off when I was planning my wordcount? Could. Have. Done. This. Better.

I often wondered how one could have a secret identity when one’s power was basically to have a chair for a head. A little help with that one?

Day six: Target wordcount: 32000. Words written: 32000

(Counts switched to running totals, as I finally ‘fessed up to cheating a bit yesterday)

The first act is finished. 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. It has a prologue, of course because all my stories have prologues, almost none of which survive the editor. Just for fun I’ve given the second act a prologue too, and that probably won’t survive either. This is a first draft, though, so some serious pruning during the rewrite is to be expected.

Speaking of which: It may be a problem particular to the books that are the sequels to something else, but I’ve noticed something about the “infodump.” In this case, the infodump in question is the recap of what happened in the previous book that is relevant and necessary to the events about to unfold, but I think I’d make the same comment about infodumps in general, especially ones about the workings of the world. It’s possible that in Chromium there are currently four different places in which some character explains to another character, or else muses internally, on certain previous events. Splitting it like that goes some way to avoid the “look, here’s a synopsis of the previous book” chapters which I personally don’t like while keeping each “mini-dump” feeling so natural and unobtrusive that the reader barely notices. Or so goes the plan. What I notice now looking back is that these overlap quite a lot. The same things are being repeated more than once. It’s not quite as bad as every protagonist having to introduce herself to every other by speaking out the litany of her deeds, but it’s definitely pretty grim. This, my friends, is what rewrites are for – rewrites will make it all better. Believe in the rewrites. For this first draft, the hand having writ moves ever on, never back, not if you want to be done in a month. I shall come back to rewrites a little later, but I’ve talked about first drafts before.

Day five: Target wordcount: 5000. Words written: 5500

Finished yesterday’s chapter and did two more. Thought I’d got rid of yesterday’s intruder, but like a bad penny, he shows up again. This is close to the end of the first act now and oddly, although much of the detail is now very unlike the original synopsis, it’s come round with all the pieces in roughly the right place, and even the second act looks it has some chance of running roughly according to outline, despite a conversation with the chief antagonist roughly along the lines of this:

Chief antagonist: Oi! Author! That plot token you wanted to have me spend the whole first half of the book chasing after – it’s right there in chapter 3.

Author: Yes I know, but. . .

Chief antagonist: Well I’m having it then.

Author: Er . . . actually I need you to . . .

Chief antagonist: (with menace) Yeeeess?

Author: Well you see in the synopsis . . .

Chief antagonist: Look, it’s right there. I can see it. Well sort of. I mean, I could if I just happened to torture a few people. And the thing is, I’m going to look like a right plonker if I walk past it.

Author: Weeeell . . .

Chief antagonist: And you wouldn’t want your Chief Antagonist to look a plonker. That’s pretty limp isn’t it? Doesn’t that undermine the whole square-jawed hero thing?

Author: I suppose.

Chief antagonist: Good, I’m glad that’s sorted then.

Author: But . . .

Chief antagonist: I know, I know.  Was supposed to spend half of act two chasing after it and then the other half chasing after Captain Square-Jaw. How about I spend the whole of act two chasing him instead?

Author: Well . . .

Chief antagonist: Good. Glad that’s settled. If it helps, I’ll eat or maim a few Significant Characters along the way.

Author: Not really.

Chief antagonist: I could start with that one that gatecrashed in chapter six and won’t go away. Shall we talk about the ending you had in mind now or later, by the way. Because to be frank there’s one or two changes I wish to discuss.

Author: (weakly) Later?

Chief antagonist: Don’t think I won’t remember.

So anyway, beating the OCD dragon: See, wordcounts work fairly well for me on account of being mildly obsessive-compulsive; thus if there’s a wordcount set for the day, I will try very hard to hit it.  However, there can be days when it’s really very necessary to simply let go and accept that it’s not going to happen. For those like me who find it a bit hard to let go, I have a couple of tricks I can recommend. First is to give yourself some days off. I you have a bad day, you can declare that to be your day off instead. Second is to cheat. If you’ve been keeping count, you’d have Chromium at 21,500 words by now, but it’s not, it’s at 29,500. I write a few thousand words of my opening chapters before I officially start. Then when I have a bad day, I already made up for it in advance. How cool is that?

Day four: Target wordcount: 3000 (on the road). Words written: 2700 (slacking off because I have credit from yesterday, but about 2000 of those were written on the Central Line in and out of Tottenham Court Road so I refuse to feel bad about it)

A chapter and a half-chapter today, in which my erstwhile hero finally gets some decent page-time instead of being usurped by his supporting cast. Or that was what the plan said, but I seem to have a gatecrasher. Some refugee whose existence I’d never even imagined until about three chapters ago is now hanging out with my hero trying valiantly to be interesting enough to last. Give that he (gender TBC) has lasted a chapter and a half and shows no sign of going away, I suspect he’ll succeed.

This is a case of a character spontaneously to fill a hole. My hero was supposed to be travelling with someone else at the moment, with whom he was supposed to have a falling out later. Writing out their first scene together made it clear that any delay was only ever going to look like procrastination and they went and had their falling out right there and then, thus leaving him unexpectedly alone and in need of comapny; and so, like taking a new lover on the rebound, this newcomer jumps in to fill a vacant space and seems a delight of new possibilities. Continuing with the same analogy, I suspect he stands a fair chance of turning out to be a complete disaster who’s soon trying to tell me how to run my plot, demands I stop seeing all my minor characters so I can write more page-time for him, and finally blows everything up in my face about two-thirds of the way through when I’m just starting to steer a course towards the final act.

Still, he’s in. For now. Ever the optimist or ever desperate, I’m really not sure…

Day three: Target wordcount: 3000 (errands to run). Words written: 3300

A chapter and a half done today. All the major characters are now in play and it feels a bit like setting up a position on a chessboard. Like trying to reproduce a famous opening and not quite remembering how it goes and getting somewhere close but not being quite sure and now I’ve played it and it’s not quite how I remembered it, which might mean that it’s a brilliant and startling innovation or else that it has a critical flaw in its defence that’s going to make everything unravel later. And like a game of chess, the only way to know is to play it out and see what happens.

A first draft is not the beginning of a story. I’d hazard there are almost no authors at all who sit down in front of a blank script and start writing with absolutely no idea of genre, character, theme or plot, although it does now sound temptingly zen and also dangerously close to how I write blog posts. From what I’ve seen, we all have our own ways of preparing for the First Draft. Some plan with meticulous precision and copious notes. Some seem to come up with a single idea, and think, Oooh, a story about a Belgian parakeet who talks to the dead and off they go without any idea of anything more, making it up as they go along. Personally I need a little more, although sometimes not very much (Dragon Queen, for example: The Taiytakei steal dragons and, while they’re at it, a dragon-queen. Consequences ensue. Good enough for a novel twice as long as this one, that was, although the first rewrite was colossal). For Chromium, I’ve started from a four-page synopsis, one page with very brief character outlines and three pages that gives a sentence or two to each of the chapters I thought I was going to write. Generally speaking I find the more work I do up front, the better the first draft is, although though that neither always works out nor equates necessarily to a better final product. The idea this time was that a very brief synopsis for each chapter ought to make starting to write each one somewhat easier.

Anyhow, this is about the point in the first draft where all that planning starts to fray at the edges. Ideas that looked fine in a two-page synopsis now appear dull and contrived when put into proper prose. The characters are mostly as they were intended, but one of them is developing more, ah, personality than expected and the main threat has turned out a bit crunchier that intended. This is all to the good, but has mades one of the intended relationships quite different. However, my main no-plan-survives-contact-with-the-enemy thing right now is that the story I’ve written seems to have found a short-cut around the synopsis that eradicates the need for about four planned chapters. At the same time, the lead character finds himself in a situation that wasn’t quite as I’d intended it at this point and a character I didn’t even know existed when I started looks like they might be making a significant part for themselves. So far none of this seems to derail the main storylines and merely weaves them in a different way.

Not that this is at all unusual, but this is where it really hits home that I’m walking into the unknown.

Day two: Target wordcount: 5700 (making up for yesterday). Words written: 5800

Actually a bit surprised to catch up today, but when the muse is in the zone, the muse is in the zone. I take these days when they come and am grateful for them, since there are also days when the muse is all hungover and surly from staying up too late and drinking too much at some all-night muse party and no amount of being flogged with a dead haddock will make her get of her lazy ass and inspire anything more than an intense need for chocolate.

Two full chapters today, a half-chapter and the start of yet another. Less talking, more fighting. Maybe that’s why. Also I like the bit where I threw someone off a cliff.

A bit about wordcounts then. Being a slave to wordcounts is a dangerous thing. It’s like being on a diet and then being a slave to the scales and waking up in the morning every single day and getting on the scales and seeing that OH MY GOD I PUT ON ANOTHER SIX GRAMS OVERNIGHT HOW IS THIS HAPPINING OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS AT AN END I AM SUCH A TOTAL FAILURE I MIGHT AS WELL EAT ENOUGH CHOCOLATE TO KILL AN ELEPHANT AND… er, I mean it’s easy to get disappointed and depressed and lose motivation. And stuff. Because like what the scales say each morning, the muse can be cultivated and directed but also fluctuates from day to day in a way that is completely out of your control and you might as well get used to it.

However, if you’re going to try and write a novel in a month or do the NaNoWriMo thing then you have a deadline and as soon as you have that, you have a wordcount target whether you like it or not, and as soon as you have that, seems to me you might as well pay some attention to how feasible it is. Especially when that count’s a big one. If you don’t know how fast you can write, it’s probably a good idea to find out. If it takes you six hours to write a thousand words, that’s how long it takes and there’s no point imagining you’re going to write five thousand in a day unless you have some very advanced ideas about space-time. Be realistic about how much time you actually have in a day for writing too. You might have thought I’ve done this sort of thing enough times not to cock up, but I’ve given myself five hours a day for Chromium which it turns out I don’t quite actually have, because there were various basic things like eating food and staring vacantly into space that I forgot to consider. I could, on a really good day, get done in three. On bad day, I’d need a time machine. I’m going for something that experience tells me I ought to manage, most days, to hit. Note also Mark’s comment on the yesterday’s entry. Write words at a rate that suits you, not the one that someone else said might be a good idea or the one that’s necessary to meet some ephemeral target in the three minutes of free time you have every day. If you don’t know what rate that is and you want to set yourself targets, I suggest finding out. Targets are there to help, to motivate, maybe for a bit of goading and definitely for a bit of feelgood when they get hit, not to stress, taunt and demoralise because they’re always out of reach. Choose them with care. Give yourself a day off now and then, too. These are important. They are for playing Skyrim (none today. I was good).

This really is shockingly like diet advice.

a.k.a. My Own Personal Novel Writing Month.

While (a tiny fraction of) the rest of the world observed national Novel Writing Month back in November, I was in the middle of a stack of rewrites for Dragon Queen. It was pretty cool watching lots of people racking up their wordcounts and a bit sad watching the agony for others as they found they simply couldn’t do what they’d hoped they could.

My situation is probably a little different to most of yours. Over the next month, I am aiming to write the first draft of a novel I shall call Chromium for now (working title). This is my day-job, my profession. I have about four weeks to knock up a usable first draft of a 100k word novel (bit of a packed schedule in the first half of this year). To be honest, I expect to fail and be content if it takes six weeks rather than four. Over the next month, I plan to give a day-by-day progress report along with hints, tips and the occasional rant and pulling-out of hair. I hope this might be either vaguely useful, informative or amusing, but I guess I won’t know that until I can look back on it from the other end. So here goes:

Some entries may be rather terse, as there might not be much time left in the day for the blog! Also, checking for typos and other errors may be, ah… minimal.

Day one: Target wordcount: 5000. Words written: 4300

Failure on the first day. During NaNoWriMo, I’ve seen people get despondent about this, when they get behind their wordcount target. Don’t let the wordcount rule your life. Yes, maybe you need one as a guide if you aim to write x-thousand words in Y days. But the muse comes as the muse comes and so does all sorts of other shit. You need to allow for that. I’ll say some more tomorrow about planning and knowing how much time you have in the day and how that translates into words. I had a bad night last night, felt grotty all day and spent an hour playing Skyrim when I could have been writing, and that probably made the different. And I don’t feel bad about it at all :-p

Today’s output: One full chapter and two half-chapters in which the principle characters talk at each other about what’s going on, what happened in the last book and some more about what’s going on. This was a really dialogue heavy day and it’s all pretty bland stuff. Today’s scenes have a fair amount of recapping of the previous book in the series (this being the second of three), too much talking and about as much atmosphere as the inside of a synthetic duvet. In short, they’re a bit crap and if I read this aloud, I’d be bored. I’ll say more about what a first draft is and isn’t and how extensive rewrites can be as this progresses; for now, for the early stages of a first draft, I’m OK with this – more than anything, what I want is for the characters to start having clear voices of their own, and for that a lot of talking is good. When the rewrites come along, I expect the dialogue to be pruned heavily and a great deal more atmosphere to be added to the locations.