Novel Watch #39: +1.5 pages [100 total]
Today we come to a new milestone: an even 100 pages of novel. Most of that is only of middling quality, but I take my wins where I can get them. At least much of those 100 pages will probably end up in the final book in some form or another. My word count is currently up to ~65,000 words, which isn’t bad, but could be better. Another 15,000 words and it’ll move up to 4th place on my Top 15 Longest Stories and Series, narrowly edging out my ThatPlace series.
Okay, I’m done boring you all with lots of numbers. You can come back now, all right? Hello?
One thing that’s really helped the last few days has been thinking of the story as a series of short stories, tightly interwoven. Most books have a rising action throughout that climaxes towards the end, and most good books have a series of mini-climaxes throughout. I don’t know if I managed to really make this one of those, but at least I’ve gotten a little cycle going. Thinking of the book in terms of short stories kind of helps me separate out how things fit together and where I need to focus. My first 85 page suffer a little from my tendency to try to write everything out in a continuous chronology. By skipping ahead to part 2 (admittedly, I wasn’t skipping more than, say, 15 pages or so), I was able to break out of that a little and use scene breaks better. I think it holds together better this way.
The other thing I did today was map out parts 2 and 3 a little. I already had a tiny little list of important plots points, but now I have it expanded a little to also be divided into sections. Will these be chapters? I don’t know. The chapters might break in the middle of these bits, even, if I find a dramatic pause in the right place. The important thing is that I can work on each section at a time without having to worry so much about the whole thing.
As you can probably imagine, this is something of a relief.
Most importantly, though . . . 100 pages! Woo! Party!