Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Writing Log: 9/2/09

[Dropped off kids and went grocery shopping.]

Writing Start time: 10:30 am
Wrote for 2.5 hours, got 3,000 words.

Nearly completed Chapter 2, Scene 3. I significantly altered my original conception of the scene, though not its ultimate purpose and conclusion. In the outline the scene was resolved with violence, but I turned it into an extended conversation/negotiation that also provided a nice hook for revealing some more information about Dahvo's character as well as kick-starting his quest. Pretty happy with it for a first draft and this is much more the writing pace I was hoping for.

I think if I mull over a few things tonight I will have enough ideas percolating to get another good start tomorrow.

I'm also realizing that most of what I had outlined as scenes within chapters are more likely going to expand into full-fledged chapters. This means I'm going to have a lot more chapters than I originally planned and that most will be shorter than I anticipated. This probably pushes the totals for Book One toward 20 plus chapters instead of 9 (!), but the resulting word count is likely to end up increasing by only about a third to a half.

If it holds up, that change will also balance out the length of the first and second books in the novel significantly. I could be looking at anywhere from 450 to 500 paperback pages in total, which seems reasonable enough for a novel in the genre.

It also skews my original plans about deadlines quite a bit. But I'll just have to see how that goes; if I make steady progress toward a better manuscript, I will be satisfied. I think.

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