Writing Day

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I’ve had a week or so of heavy manual labour cutting trees down and cutting them up, building raised garden beds, and hauling umpteen wheelbarrows full of soil (plus bags of peat and compost) around to fill them all, and doing a ton of other yard work that’s been neglected or on the ‘To Do’ list for a while. In some cases, a long while.

I’m happy with the progress but, frankly, I’ve made this much progress by spending less time than I’ve wanted to on creative stuff and a couple of other important things in my life.

So I decided to have a ‘weekend’ where I do only proper maintenance housework (dishes, laundry, cooking, vacuuming sort of stuff) and schedule only minor items otherwise so I can spend some of that extra time on creative work, not necessarily catching up to where I would have been, but putting in a few extra hours so I can feel good about my productivity.

I’ve kind of stuck to that today, squeezing in a little more yard work since it hasn’t rained like the weather forecast promised, and further made myself the deal that I’d get as much as I could get done on one thing.

7,104 words later, the first draft of Pride of Andor is finished at 24,419 words, remarkably close to my projection of 24,200. The math (because how else would you project a numerical total) did briefly put that project up over 26k at the midpoint when I had four out of a string of six scenes need more words than I expected to convert from pure dialogue to readable prose, two of which were big and made a serious impact on the projection, but it settled out in the 24-24.5k range for the rest of the time after that.

Sorry. I’m an Excel geek and I track everything. I love spreadsheets

Anyway, I think the 24.4k words in question are mostly good words. Sure, I expect some tweaking in the third draft as I make sure everything says what I want it to, but the second draft, when it gets to the top of the list, I think is going to go fast because I don’t feel like there’s that much that needs fixing. It probably helps that I wrote the draft in exactly two weeks so I may have been able to have the whole story in my head every time I sat down to type. It probably helped even more that this was technically a conversion from an audio script and I could fix the things I didn’t quite like or that were problems while doing the conversion. Realistically, this is probably already a second draft in terms of my normal process. And while the story is substantively the same, there are some significant differences, too, and quite a bit of new dialogue that isn’t in the audio scripts. Such is writing.

But I’m thrilled with what I’ve gotten done today and hope to spend an hour or two on the editing side of things before it’s time for bed.

For day two of my writing tomorrow, the basic plan is to finish the first draft of “Drifting” (working title, probably not the final one), currently about ¾ complete and likely to come in at 3200-3500 words when that’s done, and then move on to making a whole bunch of progress (hopefully) on the third draft of Fallen Heroes. After that, back to something like a “COVID Normal” schedule that involves a lot more chores and household projects.

Stay safe and be well, everyone.

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