Friday night writing tally

Well, I am pretty much done for the evening. Certainly writing wise there's no more in me. Not to say I am going to just laze my way from here until I collapse in my pit. I will probably go to find some more places to submit any of my books.

Tonight's writing has seen three scenes of the book written; the final two of chapter 14 and the first of chapter 15. It's taken the book up to 58,366. Below is a quick chart of how it's going

Day total - 2,108
NaNoWriMo total - 30,929
Novel total - 58,366

Think I am now back on track with it after my mini-block a few days back. I think the problem was I wrote out to the end of what I had planned and stopped at the point I needed to figure out. I know it's not following the writing advice of always stop when you know what you're going to write next and I paid the price for it. It took four days to figure out the next scene. I guess it's part of the gig when you're a partial planner / partial seat of pants type writer.

I do plan out my books before I start them but not in the sense of every chapter being plotted out in full before I create the new Word doc. It's much more the case of a bunch of jumbled notes in a notebook detailing the characters, the locations and the rough plot. Detail exists in my books for the important milestones in the plot and the key things I absolutely must get covered but not every step or bowel movement that the characters perform during the novel itself. I like to leave a little to spontaneity along the way; let inspiration strike.

Well that's all well and good except that it just didn't for a few days and put my behind the curve regarding NaNoWriMo. Which is a real downer considering just how far ahead I was after ten days. You see, to do this 50K in 30 days thing you need to average 1,667 words per day. I started in on this with a great deal of confidence.


After all I had written more than 7K in one day to finish the Patternmaker's Daughter and then followed it up with 27.5K in the last seven days of October before NaNoWriMo started. Surely 50K in a month was child's play. The first week suggested I would be right too. 14,706 in seven days; 21,185 in ten. Then came the block.

Now I am hopeful I will be able to make some of this time up but only time will tell. I do know the next scene I am going to write and the one after that. It does get a little hazier after that but I know where it's got to get to and can only think of one possible way it would do it so there's hope.

Away from this novel I have been playing around with the other ideas. I think it's down to the YA supernatural story I've been sketching out over the last few days or a witchy thing I plotted out a few years back but never wrote. But then there's always the next Ben Williamson novella. That might just jump the queue if either of the two submissions that requested the whole manuscript go anywhere. If it sells I might well feel compelled to try to repeat the experience. I have a special notebook filled with nasty things to do to Mr. Williamson. I'm sure one of them will find its way onto the my computer screen at some point.

Oh, and then there's the Venice-ish story I wrote the first chapter for last month just to get it out of my head. That plot is still rattling around the grey matter somewhere. Hopefully it is finding some friends amongst all the plot devices, characters and scenarios that live in their deep dark recesses of my brain. It might come back fully formed.

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