Man, it’s been forever since I’ve posted something. I’d blog more often, but I think you guys would get bored pretty quick if all I did was tell you how the writing went each day. Don’t be fooled; the writing process isn’t NEARLY as interesting as the stuff we write (unless you’re writing amateur fanfic…just kidding!).
So anyways, life is extremely busy these days. Between my temp job at a warehouse, Leading Edge, Institute, church, Quark, and finishing the revision of Mercenary Savior, I feel incredibly crunched for time. I’ve been pulling about 1k to 3k words per day, but last week was horrendously unproductive and I’ve got to really push hard to finish this beast in time for World Fantasy.
But it’s going to happen–that’s for sure. I’ll finish my job at the end of this week, and with the extra free time I’m sure I’ll be able to finish it in time. I passed the 100k word mark last night, and it looks like this draft is going to be around 120k to 125k. Still a little long for a science fiction novel, but not too long (I hope).
As I get closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I tend to use a shotgun approach in resolving the conflicts in my rough drafts. Instead of following each arc through in a focused, logical manner, the last few chapters of my drafts tend to go all over the place, trying halfheartedly to resolve everything at once.
The bad thing about this is that the last half of the book requires a lot more work to revise. The good part, however, is that I can cut off a ton of fat at the tail end, significantly shortening the final wordcount. It’s good to be able to manipulate that number late in the game.
As far as my plans for November, if I do participate in nanowrimo, it’s going to be with a serious project that I was already planning on doing, not something wild and spontaneous. I don’t think taking the time off to write something I know will never be published is going to help me as a writer.
At the same time, however, it only takes about 1.5k to 2k per day for 30 days to complete nanowrimo, and that’s about the rate that I’m writing right now (a little less, actually). With World Fantasy smack at the end of October, I probably won’t start anything new until November 1st. So even though I’m not taking time off from my serious stuff to do it, I probably will participate in nanowrimo this year.
As far as other stuff going on in November, I am very much looking forward to seeing my sister in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend. Since I don’t know if I can find a job that will give me that week off, and since I’m already in a pretty good financial place with the money from this last job, I think I’ll take most of the month off to focus on my writing, rather than look for full-time work.
However, I have been thinking a lot about becoming a freelance translator. One thing I’ve learned from working in a warehouse (and I’ll blog more about this at the end of the week) is that I hate not using the stuff I learned in college. My original plan when I chose to major in Mideast studies was to use Arabic to find a regular job until the writing took off, and so far I haven’t done that.
Besides, I REALLY want to go back to the Middle East someday. If I can improve my Arabic to the point where I feel I can get along better than the average American student, I might just move over there for a year or two (or five or ten…).
Anyhow, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do (including writing–I want to hit at least 3k today), so that’s all for now. See ya!
