150 days. 75106 words

[ellarien]

And thing_in_150 is over, at least the first round.

Behemoth 47 is at 31,117 words, and I'm at the point where I wonder whatever gave me the idea I could write, let alone write novels. (I couldn't characterize my way out of a wet paper bag, and whatever voice I once had has disappeared into a morass of cliches, that kind of thing.) The story's at an interesting enough place that I'm not really tempted to give up, though.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

It's that million words of crap thing. I didn't like it at the time, but now I've got mine, I have to say it's astonishingly accurate. Nobody expects their first painting to be exactly as they wanted it to turn out, their first piece of woodwork, their first time playing an instrument, thier first computer program, their first *anything*.

First novels are just as frustrating, just as much of a learning experience. The vast majority of writers starts out exactly the same; the ones that end up able to write well tend to be the ones that persevere. Talent appears rather incidental.

[ellarien]

The frustrating thing is that I'm reasonably sure I was writing better than this back in the early 1990s, back in that chilly little Birmingham terraced house when the Web was new. It's my own fault for stopping for so long, of course; that was only a couple of hundred thousand words ago, but a lot of reading and life experience.