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ellarienI hope to hit 60K words on the Behemoth novel tonight. Heroine has yet to meet Internet Love-interest, and hasn't heard from him in a while; meanwhile she is getting somewhat friendly with Computer Guru, who she doesn't know is a government spy. Apart from that, she's turning out to be alarmingly competent, and has singularly failed to make any interesting mistakes. (Well, there was the thing with the booby-trapped data file, but the main consequence of that was a brief yelling-at by Computer Guru, followed by more interesting work.) I wonder if I'm projecting my own terror of failure onto her? I also haven't managed to slip in quite as much background as I would have liked.
Up until last night, when I skipped over an important scene because I needed to write something and couldn't face that bit, this novel has insisted on a very linear process, which feels odd after all these years when what writing I did at all happened in almost random order.
The original idea was that Heroine and Love Interest would get together somewhere around the middle of the story -- even earlier, I think, when I first started trying to lay out the shape of the thing -- after which his Sekrit Identity will be revealed, we figure out some way to maintain the Captain's motivation when he has back the one thing he's always said he wanted, and they all go off to find the sunken treasure, rescue Heroine's father, and thereby solve the main problem facing that corner of the universe.
Now I'm wondering whether I can actually fit all that into 40K words, or even 60K, and whether it might not be better to make a duology of it, in which the reunion is the climax of the first volume and the other stuff happens in the second. I am not enthused by this idea, however; I would really like to have the first draft of this thing done before the summer!
As I've mentioned once or twice before, trying to write to a set wordage per day is a bit problematic for my process. On the one hand, it does keep the words piling up, mostly, though sometimes I get tired and resentful of the obligation; on the other hand, if the next bit of actual story isn't ready yet, I can easily spend a week writing 500 words of filler every day. And 500 words a day seems to be close enough to the limit of what my brain can generate, given the other things I need it for, that it's hard to step back and see the bigger picture of the story; I might be better off using those 100 minutes or so to plan, rather than writing pages of useless banter.
In the meantime, I have laundry and housecleaning to do, and it's grey and rainy and I'd much rather curl up with a good book. I have been rather starved of stories lately; in the first two weeks of the year I read about half of the big serious Oppenheimer book, and all of Philbrick's Mayflower, then allowed myself some fiction in the form of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I did not find entirely satisfactory, and now I'm wading through the latest Covenant book while almost completely failing to remember what happened in the previous one. That's the other problem with writing regularly; it eats up reading time!
Up until last night, when I skipped over an important scene because I needed to write something and couldn't face that bit, this novel has insisted on a very linear process, which feels odd after all these years when what writing I did at all happened in almost random order.
The original idea was that Heroine and Love Interest would get together somewhere around the middle of the story -- even earlier, I think, when I first started trying to lay out the shape of the thing -- after which his Sekrit Identity will be revealed, we figure out some way to maintain the Captain's motivation when he has back the one thing he's always said he wanted, and they all go off to find the sunken treasure, rescue Heroine's father, and thereby solve the main problem facing that corner of the universe.
Now I'm wondering whether I can actually fit all that into 40K words, or even 60K, and whether it might not be better to make a duology of it, in which the reunion is the climax of the first volume and the other stuff happens in the second. I am not enthused by this idea, however; I would really like to have the first draft of this thing done before the summer!
As I've mentioned once or twice before, trying to write to a set wordage per day is a bit problematic for my process. On the one hand, it does keep the words piling up, mostly, though sometimes I get tired and resentful of the obligation; on the other hand, if the next bit of actual story isn't ready yet, I can easily spend a week writing 500 words of filler every day. And 500 words a day seems to be close enough to the limit of what my brain can generate, given the other things I need it for, that it's hard to step back and see the bigger picture of the story; I might be better off using those 100 minutes or so to plan, rather than writing pages of useless banter.
In the meantime, I have laundry and housecleaning to do, and it's grey and rainy and I'd much rather curl up with a good book. I have been rather starved of stories lately; in the first two weeks of the year I read about half of the big serious Oppenheimer book, and all of Philbrick's Mayflower, then allowed myself some fiction in the form of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I did not find entirely satisfactory, and now I'm wading through the latest Covenant book while almost completely failing to remember what happened in the previous one. That's the other problem with writing regularly; it eats up reading time!
