Rough draft is done!

Allahu Akbar.

Final word count: 117,418

I averaged 2053 WPD between Nov 1 and Dec 22. That's counting several days when I didn't write at all.

Now I'm going to put it away and not look at it for the next several days. Editing begins Jan 1. After the first editing pass, I'll probably post another word count. At this point, I think it'll get longer rather than shorter: my to-do list has stuff to add, and while I think there's some redundant verbiage and some dialogue that could be tighter, I don't think there's that much.

Thank you, God. It's been a long strange trip.

One hundred thousand

plus words.

My WPD is back up over 2000.

But here's the real shocker: In the last 6 days I've written almost 20,000 words. That's about 3000 per day. I'm flying.

There are still some places I have to go back and fill in. I'll probably spend most of the weekend reworking the Mafileo/Waïlaraitēo scenes. The WPD will go down some, although it will actually probably be mostly additional writing rather than rewriting.

I'm also probably going to completely toss the "Beginning of the end" file. There's a lot in there that just doesn't go with how I've imagined things since. I want to save the description of the storm: everything else can go.

There's definitely light at the end of that tunnel now...

God knows these words are not coming from me. My head is as empty as the husk of a coconut.

Writing makes me crave chocolate.

Word count change

I'm changing my word count; it seems silly to go on accumulating "overage" toward a goal I've already met. Instead I'm going to track my total and average.

Trying to maintain the 2000-word-per-day rate. Yesterday was a shortfall, but that's only to be expected. Typically weekdays fall short and I make it up on weekends.

Another milestone

I've reached the NaNoWriMo goal: I've written over 50,000 words in November, and it's only the 25th.

Alhumdulillah.

My total now stands at over 64,000... and I feel like I'm about half way, maybe a little more. This is going to be a 100,000 - 120,000 word novel. Allahu akbar!

The plan right now is to try to keep the pace through December. I'm actually averaging over 2000 words a day (including Thanksgiving Day when we were on the road and I wrote 0 words). At that rate, by the end of November I would have about 74,000 words. 30 or so days in December would give me another 60,000. I should be done by then.

I hope.

Then I have to do some editing. I know there's redundant dialog that I have to pare down and tighten up. There are some places where I want to cut out some description and instead write scenes that depict what I'm saying. Also check for minor continuity errors, etc. And run a spellcheck *cringe*

What I think I'll do is finish the rough draft and maybe make one editing pass... then send it out to some alpha readers, at least three or four. And put it away, and not look at it or at their comments on it, at least until I get them all back. Then (we should be well into the New Year by this time) I'll settle in and do some serious editing.

Then I get to start looking for a publisher. Wee ha! But the first step is to finish the beast.

It's a damned good story... and there are some bits of really good writing in it. I just have to try to keep the level up. May God help me.

Milestones

I now have over 50,000 words written, including the 12,000-plus I had at the beginning of the month. I'm not half done. I think I'm close to half done.

It looks like we're not going to the coast after all, but I'm still taking the next couple of days off for the heck of it.

If I can keep this up for 11 more days, I will finish the month with a total of well over 70,000 words. Then I'll have a decision to make. Back off from it and get back into the poetry groove? Or forge ahead and try to finish the rough draft? Watch this space...

Something else to note: After a scare about the home computers, I've uploaded all my Drumheart files as Google docs. Let them worry about backups. The only drawback is that some weird things happened with the formatting: I lost all my tab-indents and I got a weird mix of fonts. Some of this is probably due to the way my docs have been shipped back and forth between OOWriter's .doc format and genuine MSWord format (I have to figure out how to get all the quotes to line up...), but some is just GoogleDoc weirdness. Probably what I should do is download them all into one format, fix whatever needs fixing, and then do copy/paste instead of upload to get the fixes back into GoogleDoc.

One more note: My typing speed has gone way up since Nov. 1. Unfortunately, so has my error rate. I'm going to have to spellcheck the whole thing at some point-- and then I'm going to have to proofread it...

Beginning word count

Official word count as of this morning: 12,509. Mostly written a couple of years ago, some over the last month.

BTW, if anyone's reading this blog, November's gonna be boring. I'm having plenty of good ideas, but they're getting rolled into the text and I feel like it's double work to write about them here. So... unless you really get off on reading word counts...