Tuesday, March 25, 2008

back in the saddle again!

Finally found my third novel after all the false starts and it's going to be awesome.

Everyone's favorite fun time, new novel math!

Goal: 5000 words/week (what I know I can get even when things are bad), 100k total.
Timeline: 100,000/5000 = first draft done in 20 weeks, or the beginning of August (I'm cheating here a little, I actually already have 10k from a previous false start on this novel, but since I'll probably have to rewrite it anyway, I'm going to act like I'm starting from scratch.)

There's a lot going on plotwise in this novel, a lot of information to be packed into a relatively small amount of space. Looking at my notes, I could easily ramble on for 200k. However, 200k is unacceptable, so I'm going to do my best while writing to think "how is this important to the story? Could I do this better elsewhere?" Experience has shown that I am a piss poor editor, so doing more of this thinking during the writing phase of things might just make things easier. ANYTHING to avoid chopping a 200k novel down to 100k. That's just cruel and awful.

My end goal is to really take my time with this one, to get it written, then let it sit and cook while I do other things. Then, when I've forgotten how much I hate it (I hate every book I write for weeks after I finish it, and as soon as I type "The End" my fingers get physically itchy with the urge to go and fix all my mistakes right away. It's like I'm worried they'll become permanent if I let them sit, kind of like wine stains.) Well, not this time! This time I will restrain myself for AT LEAST a month.

I'm not even going to write out a time line for my edit. It'll just get done when it gets done.

Ah, it feels good to be back in the game. Watch the wordmeter, here we go again!

2 comments:

cindy said...

i've missed your posts. and congrats! i'm still obsessed and mired in querying. i'm going to revise my partials and send out the partial queries. i don't think i can move on till i can get an agent or lay this book to rest!

Rachel Aaron said...

That's exactly where I was at the start of this month. When I actually look at my query list, I've still got tons of people left to go, but for some reason at 3 months I slipped into "well, that was a nice go, time for something new!" mode.

Good luck in everything!