Author: Imperium Romanum

So through a combination of miscalculating the word goal yesterday and it being Thanksgiving and thus barely getting anything done, I am now extremely behind, 34,396 of 38,334, and will undoubtedly need more than 2k words per day to catch up. The good news is that producing 4k words in a day is something I’ve done before and can do again, and doing that twice in a row will have me caught up. Even writing just 3k per day will have me caught up in just three days, so 3k daily is now the goal. I have an outline all written out again so that should expedite things.

My brief experiment with writing on impulse yesterday has mainly reassured me that what I thought earlier was true: I can sustain discovery writing for about 10,000 words and then it becomes so aimless as to be completely useless. Also, it tends to lead to entire scenes that probably don’t even need to exist. I wrote a thrilling escape scene, except if I were to expand that into an entire story, I would probably end up cutting that escape scene, since the entirety of its impact on what might eventually be the plot is to strand some characters in the middle of a jungle where the actual plot occurs. I did not really figure out what the central conflict of one of my characters was until near the end, have not figured out what the central conflict of the other is at all (though I have some ideas), and I’m not certain the character relations were actually very well thought through. I plotted them all out from scratch in just a few hours.

Whole thing got me to 33,827 out of 35,000, which is still badly behind but at least isn’t falling any more behind. I also think I have a proper outline just about sorted and still enough time left to catch up at 2k words a day (barely!), so we’ll see how this goes.

I spent most of today looking for a third arc and realized I’d written myself into a corner. I had two viewpoint characters, neither of whom I immediately wanted to give a second arc to, and then a few others who could only be promoted to viewpoint characters if I found some way to get them involved in the story. The problem was, the story’s actual plot was both secret and hard to access. I got through the first bit of the outline for my third arc revolving around a secondary character who was going to be promoted to viewpoint protagonist, and then realized that I was basically just copying my second arc with only some tiny tweaks. I tried promoting one of the only characters who already had full and regular access to the actual plot to viewpoint character, but it didn’t take long into the outline for that before I realized that he didn’t really have anything to do with all these characters.

And this is the point when I realized that I had written myself into a corner. Bringing new characters into the plot was too difficult. Old characters had already resolved an arc and didn’t have anywhere to go without further monumental upheaval. And I was constantly haunted by the fact that I’d really only created enough characters to serve the outline that lasted me only for my first 12,000-ish words, and that honestly I’m not super thrilled by any setting in which I cannot give my characters a submachine gun.

I wrestled with the idea of starting a completely new and different plot for a while, one that would be detached from the two biggest stumbling blocks of this one: Very few characters had a motivation to get involved with any kind of actual plot, and the plot was hard to reach which meant characters needed a powerful motivation to get there. Ultimately, with just a few hours left in the day, I took the characters I had sketched out, decided to forego finishing the actual plot outline (I really only had a very basic concept, and that selected largely on auto-pilot), stuck the characters on a hostile spaceship, and told them to get off of it before I killed them.

I’ve gotten to 32,473 out of 35,000 with this method. We’ll see if it pans out long term.

I keep slipping further behind. Word count for today is 31,016 of 33,334. I can still make this up, but it is more than one full day behind and I’m beginning to reach the limits of what I can make up by just writing 2k daily until November 30th. The good news is that I have been able to write more than 2k fairly reliably in the past. The bad news is that I’m still kind of fumbling around to figure out what my third arc is going to be.

Wordcount for today is 30,697 of 31,667, although once again by the time I even got around to writing this blog post I’d already got it up to 31,089. Here’s the problem: I’ve run out of outline again. I mean, I haven’t really arrived at a specific ending point yet, but this story is out of momentum and it needs a new arc to get anywhere. I might have another, like, 300 words until I reach the actual ending line, but that’s not even going to get me up to day 19’s goal, let alone day 20’s, and I’m going to have to spend some/all of day 20 outlining a new section.

Another one of those days where I kept writing a ways after midnight, so my word count for the day is not the same as the word count when I stopped writing and went to sleep. Today’s word count is technically 27,252 out of 30,000, a significant deficit and then some, but by the time I went to sleep it was up to 29,288, close enough that I’m hoping to catch up tomorrow. Not only is this not the first time I’ve said that, though, this isn’t even the first time I’ve noticed that this isn’t the first time I’ve said that. Particularly, the day in which nothing got done wasn’t even all that eventful – I just got distracted with a completely different project (one that may show up on this blog after November).

No progress today. At all. First time that’s happened, the one time I was at least able to throw in like eight words by adding some titles. I’ve got enough time left to absorb this blow, I just have to avoid making a habit of it, and the bright side is that I did spend the day working on a bunch of other stuff.

I’m pretty sure I made my word quota and then some if you count all the writing I did unrelated to my actual novel, and some people do count literally any word of fiction written during November as part of their 50,000 total. Seeing as how my primary motivation here is just to keep being productive in a month that’s typically been fallow for me, I could probably justify taking that approach. It doesn’t feel right, though, and since the goal is arbitrary, I’ve decided to stick to 50,000 words written for the specific story I started on November 1st. By that metric, I’m at 25,938 of 26,667. Behind, but I should be able to catch up in a day or two. My primary worry is that if I have one of these lag behind days right before the end, and it takes me 2-3 days to catch up, well, I won’t have 2-3 days. I should try to build up a buffer to guard against this.

So I had that dentist’s appointment today. Due to the lack of local public transportation, my car having broken down and my being absolutely sick of throwing money into repairing that clunker, not having enough money to buy a new one, resolving to just bike around until I can save up some more, and then the bike’s tires going flat, I spent a total of about three hours today walking to and from my dentist’s appointment. Not to mention about half an hour actually at the dentist. I have a cavity I need looked at on the twenty-seventh, so that’s neat. On top of that, a friend needed someone to talk to so I spent like two hours doing that, too. I’m not going into details for the sake of their privacy, but it was a huge fucking deal.

All of this to say that the last few hundred of my 25,116 out of 25,000 words are probably going to need editing, since it’s basically just two characters sitting around talking strategy. But hey, maybe not, because one character imparting martial wisdom onto another is an important part of the scene anyway.

I have reached 23,927 out of 23,334 words for today. This puts me back on target for the first time since day five. Now for the bad news: I have a dentist’s appointment tomorrow which, on top of all the usual nastiness involved in dentist’s appointments, is going to take up several hours of time, principally due to commute. That time is going to be displaced from other things I need to get done during the day, which means that ultimately my writing time is probably going to eat the deficit even though the dentist’s appointment is much earlier in the afternoon than when I usually write. Back on the bright side, I have a surplus of several hundred words, so even if I fall behind tomorrow, it should be by little enough that I can catch up with a few more 2k word days, which I’ve been able to churn out pretty reliably.