Writing Log: 9-10-09

Late start today after some morning commitments and grocery shopping. Started around noon, wrote for about 2.5 hours.

Worked on Chapter 4, Scene 4. Wrote 2500 new words for the chapter. Left a couple blank spots where transitions need to be written. Might split this into two shorter chapters.

Definitely need to map out the revised plan of chapters this weekend instead of discussing them in the now-outdated chapter/scene format. At last count I think I had basically doubled the original 9 chapter plan to 18 chapters of shorter average length. My original plan for Part II had about 25 chapters. Hopefully that does not double to 50 when I start writing. That still wouldn't be out of bounds for a lot of paperback fantasy and science fiction novels, however, as it would equate to about 725 pages or so and a lot of novels seem to come in at well over 600. It would just take a lot longer to write.

(I'm not even thinking about the issue of selling the manuscript at this stage, just finishing one that I'm happy with.)

It is definitely easiest for me to write dialogue and hardest for me to write descriptions of places, with action scenes falling somewhere in between. (I don't find action scenes that hard to write to my own satisfaction, but I think I tend to make them too long for other folks, so they take more editing.) I can't say at this point how well the internal dialogue of my characters is working.

I wonder if there is a market for people writing really, really long screenplays or graphic novel scripts with a lot of talking. Maybe audio plays? :-)