The First Week

I've been working a full 75% of the time, which is a significant improvement over the percentage of time I worked on it during NaNoWriMo.

Having never been much of a joiner, it's not surprising.

The word total stands at 28,592. I'm adding, on average 220 words each day I write.

I had gotten out the teleplay script to see what would come up next, but the more I skimmed it, the more I came to realize how much the story had changed. The teleplay was fairly silly and a parody of the hard-boiled detective genre. The novel is neither of those. It has humor, but isn't silly, is a detective story without being a parody. I think it has some literary value, at least I hope it does.

It strikes me that one of the reasons why the detective genre works as fiction is because detectives presumably do the same thing that writers presumably do: Observe life and report on it. This in a way, makes it a shame that so many examples of the genre are written so poorly.

The Next 40

I've redone my spreadsheet for another 40 day run. The idea now is to just motor on Drayton until it is done. If I work on it every day, that should happen in just over two months. That's how close I am. All I have to do is add less than 300 words per day every day and I can have a full novel drafted in 76 days.

By adding in the last three chapters of the previous version--the ones in which I started catching on to how to write a novel--I've upped the word total to 28,128. That's about 6,000 words basically overnight. Now, if I could keep that pace up, I'd be done sometime next week, but i wouldn't get any bets down in Vegas on that if I were you.

A Small Milestone

I have surpassed 22,000 words today. I'm hoping to continue working on it, so I won't give a final total quite yet.

I am trying to improve both the percentage of days that I work on the novel and the number of words produced each time.I really want to finish this and not in a year-and-a-half. I'm not setting any deadlines, but am trying to make this my obsession. I'm trying to minimize the amount of time I spend writing other things--including blogs--so my other blogs might start to wither. that's what has to happen, though, for now.