Saturday 6 April 2013

April 6th – Passed the Three Hundred Thousand Word mark.

Today I managed 2,872 words taking me to 301,375 to be exact, so I passed the 30% point today, the 300,000 word milestone. I know, I’m focussing in the blog on the numbers, but when I’m writing they are the furthest thing from my mind. I need a focus here, and I need to keep track in order to see how I’m faring against the target, but that is all.

In fact, I was very surprised to achieve the word count today, let alone achieve it at a similar speed to the last three or four days as I’m decidedly under the weather. I’ve got a cold, no it’s not man-flu, it’s a cold, sore throat and a cough, but nowhere near as bad as Marion’s. Had her cold is the thing that’s put me so far under the weather – she’s constantly waking up in the night coughing her heart out, and of course that wakes me. I’m running on empty in terms of sleep reserves, yet still managed to churn out just short of three thousand words in about 80 or 85 minutes (I wasn’t clock watching today).

I’m also happy with what I’ve written. After lunch I gave it a reads through and felt it worked quite well although there are a couple of sections, notably the narrative passages that link a couple of the action sequences together, which will need an edit from a show not tell point of view. There again, if I put all the detail in those, where, let’s be fair not a lot is happening, including a journey where my heroine manages to sleep almost from door to door, the book would become very long indeed. That is of course, often the problem, you need to transition your characters from place to place, or time to time, or both, but you don’t want to tell it in real time. If events mean you just can’t finish one chapter Tuesday night and start the next Friday night, you have to provide a link paragraph or two, and they are a sure-fire way of going tell on your reader.

Ah, well, it’s an edit fix, for now, it’s commented in the margin, to make sure I don’t miss it at the next pass, which is always a possibility especially if you allow yourself to get distracted at the crucial moment. Not that I do of course – sticks tongue in cheek and walks away whistling tunelessly.

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