Experimenting with setting up scenes in Scrivener and whatnot. I use it a lot for short story submissions, but Frozen Dreams is the first novel. It takes some getting used to.
Continue reading Frozen Dreams Working Draft Process, Day Three: 3 Chapters / 5,802 words.
And I’ve already realized that, dang, the hero should really interview the cleaning staff and the last people to use the room that the murder was in. Like, duh, this is a murder mystery, right? Makes you wonder what I was thinking. On the bright side, that will allow me to establish some stuff for later on while getting my wordcount up as a bonus. Frozen Dreams is a bit sparse in that regard. Continue reading Frozen Dreams Working Draft Process, Day Two: 2 Chapters / 3,849 words.
I’m doing this as part of the ‘motivate me to actually turn 50K words into a no-fooling novel” process. Because writing the stuff is sometimes the easiest part. Hopefully, the process will accelerate as I go on, but today I have a baronial newsletter to write so I can’t spend the afternoon processing three or four chapters.
Anyway: the working draft of Chapter 1 is in Scrivener. Or ‘first draft.’ Or ‘rough draft;’ I don’t actually know the terminology all that well. :brightly: That’s why they call this a learning experience!
Continue reading Frozen Dreams Working Draft Process, Day One: 1 Chapter / 1,901 words.
1,435/50,001.
…Done*. I wrote a goram book.
Moe Lane
*Except for collating, arranging, creating first draft, revising, expanding into rough draft, alpha reader, revising, beta reading, revising, revising, revising, final draft, and then starting the selling process. But other than that…
1,009/48,566.
It’s those last two thousand words that are killing me, let me tell ya. On the other hand, the book’s done, in terms of plot anyway. And on the gripping hand, I also want/need to finish up the Patreon short story tonight, and that’s been about a thousand words already, so there you go. Still, I’ll probably be able to hit 1,434 words tomorrow.
Moe Lane
PS: I know that it’s an artificial benchmark, but it’s still a benchmark, dig?
1,557/47,557.
A bit less than my usual 1.67K, but if I hit the same number today and tomorrow it’s 50K, easy. Besides, I’m just filling in some blanks at this point. More out of might-as-well-do-it-now than anything else.
1,702/46,000
Annnnnnd that’s the end of the book. But not the end of the writing. I have to add a bunch of stuff to make the narrative work better. That’s completely independent of the revising and subsequent drafts, of course.
But dude.
2,105/44,298
Welp. The climax of the plot is written. After this, it’s a matter of spending another couple of thousand words writing the epilogue and using the rest to insert a bunch of stuff into the text. And then we have the first draft of a short novel.
Dang.
2,064/42,193.
This total might change today, but I got to a good stopping point and my wife and youngest have just gotten home. We are just starting the final confrontations, because there’s a lot of people coming to this denouement party. Hopefully it’ll all work out. And then I just need to fill in some bits, and then we’ll have ourselves 50,000 words.
And that’s where the fun really starts. Frozen Dreams will be no more polished and ready to go than The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was when they pulled it from HP Lovecraft’s posthumous files. And, yes: I am precisely that arrogant. This is news?
2,096/40,129.
Annnnd we are back on track. Shockingly, we are also staring down the actual, no fooling, end of the plot. Once it’s done, it will be 50K words’ worth of story. I’ll have to rewrite the living hell out of the whole thing, but, yowsers, there’s a book forming here. To quote a character from the book It; it may be an awful novel, but at least it won’t be an awful unfinished novel.
Then again, given what happened to that character…
