“She understands fighting. She doesn’t understand shopping malls, much less shifted blame, scapegoating, and politics,” Melissa said.
Word count: 76,316 words
Words written since Week 3: 19,050 words
So, WH is officially finished! At least as far as the first draft goes. And the award for longest, sloppiest denouement goes to…
Seriously, my ending to the nightmare novel wasn’t this sloppy, and I wrote it at four o’clock in the morning.
I don’t know what gives or even if I’m ever going to take WH out of the trunk again. I had suck high hopes for the story, but I may have to chalk it up to a good idea and poor execution. The concept has been drifting about in my head for over a year, and up to the climax I was actually pretty good with it. It could take some polishing, some beefing up, but otherwise a decent first draft. Then that ending. I wrote everything that felt necessary, but I need to do something to keep up some of the tension, for Pete’s sake. It was awful. I mean, the last line is cool because I’d planned that for a while. But otherwise…just ugh. Such a mess.
Maybe in another nine years, I’ll can take it out again, add a few things, cut a lot, and finally feel good about it like I did with the nightmare novel. Or maybe I’m just in a bad spot in my rising and falling writer moods and happened to end on a low note. I’ve been doing so well these last few years, I was bound to have a few duds along the way.
I don’t know, and at this point it doesn’t matter, because it’s going in the trunk either way. I’ll revisit it sometime in 2014 to see if it can be salvaged with some cuts and rearranging…then to determine if it’s long enough to be shopped out.
Still, on the bright side, I wrote over 75,000 words and knocked out a short novel in less than one month, which is pretty amazing. Maybe next year I’ll try for 100k words in a month. I’m pretty sure I could do it.
Additional stats:
Number of days to finish: 24
Average word count per day: 3,180
Number of pages (single space, 12pt Book Antiqua font): 119
Number of pages (double space, 12pt Book Antiqua font): 235
Number of chapters: 25
Average chapter word count: 3,053 words (this surprises me)
Number of characters on character list (excluding a few): 34
Next up on the list of Things to Do is going over FTR1 to fix the beginning and do some character checking, then editing FTR2. We’ll get to that sometime in early 2014, January or February.
a. christine writer 