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December 2024 in writing
Third Draft Progress is slow but consistent. The holidays provided this month’s distraction. Our local dog park is temporary closed, so we now drive to a larger but further park, which eats up a large chunk of daylight, but most of the time seeing Rye that happy is the highlight of my day. And we’re getting ready for a very exciting January distraction :)
Finishing the First POV The climactic scenes took a lot longer, as usual.
Epic Fantasy word count
I’ve been stressing about keeping my dark epic fantasy debut at less than 120k words. Looks like I might not need to:
(From Thread Reader, which archived the thread from James Long (senior commissioning editor at Orbit)’s deleted Twitter account. Copying here because I don’t know if or when Thread Reader will go away.)
Quick thread on word count for debut epic fantasy novels, because there’s a load of terrible advice out there and it’s hard enough trying to write a brilliant book without worrying about whether your manuscript is too short or too long.
November 2024 in writing
Third Draft The third draft is going well.
I had forgotten just how much I had refactored the first POV. I ended up writing a number of completely new scenes. And I ended up throwing out and rewriting most of the words in the existing scenes because a) the structure has changed significantly, b) I’ve focused a bit more on including sensory details, and c) my prose has improved to the point that the existing words were painful to re-read.
October 2024 in writing
Ready or not There’s a lot more I want to do with pre-third-draft worldbuilding, outlining, and planning. But I’ve hit an enthusiasm gap – my productivity has fallen off drastically for a number of reasons, and I know I see a lot of this work as chores and housekeeping rather than creative work.
I decided mid-month that I’m going to get back to editing and drafting come November, whether I’m fully ready or not.
September 2024 in writing
Outlining Draft 3 I massively refactored parts of each POV: removing the first chapter, re-ordering the scenes, and/or changing the first quartile entirely. This removed repetition, resulting in more powerful scenes and a streamlined story.
I almost finished moving the detailed beats from each scene’s metadata to the main outline. This consolidates the beats of the story, allowing for a high level overview in a single file.
Plans for October Finish porting the scene beats to the main outline Add Questions/Promises/Reveals into the main outline Map side character relationships and the arcs’ tension levels as they change throughout the novel, to make sure they make sense Review the outline to make sure the arcs are clear and the beats are in the right order Get started on drafting/editing again Stats Again, the non-manuscript word count is somewhat inflated since I have multiple copies of the outline as I refactor.