Saturday, January 02, 2010

2010: Day Two in the life of this writer

I stayed up past one o'clock last night or should I say this morning? and woke up terribly late--after nine. I hate when I do that. Makes me feel as if I've wasted my entire day since I prefer to write in the early hours when it's still quiet and I can think.

My work in progress:  I began to write SHROUD OF LIES on June 18, 2009. Fifty days and 40,792 words later, I completed the first draft on August 5. As of today, the word count has grown to 64,143. With respects to edits, it's hard for me to judge how many I go through. I know what the manuals say, but I can't turn off the internal editor. It's like not being able to scratch an itch.


When I wrote the Harper books (four that all began life as novellas), the words poured out of me and I never gave a thought to editing the work as I wrote. Now, the more I write and study the craft, the worse (or better depending on your view) I am about editing as I go along.
On the bright side, although my first draft was much shorter than the standard novel size of a minimum 60,000 words, it was a fairly clean draft. Since then, I've read through it twice; the first time I checked for obvious errors and worked on the plotting and characterization. The second time, I continue to look for all of the above but also focus adding depth to the plot and characters as well as checking for inconsistancies.

I've had a wonderful 12 days off from work over the Christmas holiday. Two days left of my vacation, but that's okay. Aside from everything I've gotten done around the house including all the cooking and baking, I've had some amazing writing time. My goal on December 22, was to complete the edits on this book. What do you think? Can I edit eleven short chapters and write the final in the last day of my vacation? Hmm, we'll see. I'll let you know tomorrow.

Today was a definite #8.

1 comment:

Terry W. Ervin II said...

Good luck getting as far along as you can!