Monday, November 23, 2009

More Progress



It's been ten days since my last report on the JASPER novel and I'm only up about 6,800 words. The current total is around 33,500 words. I lost some time to other things (gee, the holidays are kind of approaching, aren't they?), and also I've spent time jotting down a flood of ideas for the CHASM novel using the new Snowflake software (see previous post). I've gotten so many incredible ideas this past week it's been astonishing. The story long ago hit critical mass, and now it's at a point where my new ideas blend in perfectly with what is already established, either fleshing it out, enriching it, or correcting inconsistencies or fixing whatever minor problems remain.

It's been an incredible experience. It's definitely true that the more we plan, the better we get at planning (or writing, or editing). I can see some real progress here and the quality of it knocks my socks off. I've fallen in love with this story all over again and feel so eager right now to get back to work on it as Job One.

But, I'm still writing the second complete draft of the JASPER novel, my current Job One, and I will definitely keep my primary focus on that until it's done, hopefully within November. By the way, I did reach the half-way point -- 20 chapters done, 20 to go, which puts the expected total word count at around 65,000 words. I'll shoot for less since the goal should be 40,000. There will be some scenes to cut! The outline is working out nicely and I'm sticking to it like a charm.

Back to the trenches,

Adrian

No comments: