final final slog

[jazzfish]

Fifteen hours. 4,649 words. Yesterday was around 4100 words, and that was with a four-hour break in the middle, so I'm upgrading my estimate of my chances to slightly better than 50%.

Also, wow, I can watch the plot elements being left behind in the dust as I write this. It's kind of impressive, really. Who was that one guy? Why did I introduce that thing in the first scene? What' that character's motivation? Who knows?

oog.

ETA: encouraging comments welcome and, well, encouraged.

Comments

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

(I think you locked this at DW. I can't post there.)

You can do it! It will be simple! Remember, this is a rough draft, so feel free to play with words, exposition, etc. This does not have to be perfect, just good enough.

For myself, I found that I can't plot things out all that much beforehand- I discover things as I'm writing, things I had no idea about beforehand, and if I've plotted something out too thoroughly, I lose interest in the writing because it's a problem I've already solved. So my writing has a lot of lumpy exposition and characters having long scenes of thinking about things, and the writing page is where I figure this stuff out. I am not going for elegant. I am going for movement. I can refine it later. Right now I just have to haul it all up out of the ground.

I think I've had the conversation with you about why I still do Scottish Country Dance and why I don't do Bellydance anymore (did we discuss this on Sunday? I think so)- it's because I want to dance for the fun of dancing, for the community of dancing, and not to perform for others. I like dancing where the major point is to show up and have fun and do it well enough to not get in the way of the other folks I'm dancing with. I will never be good (I am just not wired for good dancing) but I'm good enough to do it for fun.

How this relates to writing should be obvious- write because it's worth doing even if you aren't elegant. Get out there and hear the music in your skin and smile at your partners and move.

You will be fine. You will finish this. It is worth it.

[jazzfish]

Argh, that's because my NotWriting filter got out of sync between DW and LJ. Fixt.

And, yeah, this has been /all/ about Plot As I Go. I knew what the last image was going to be from the start, which meant I had a vague idea of what I was pointing at; and I wrote the last scene and part of the one before, um, yesterday, so now I know who lives and who dies, which will be handy as I approach the Big Climax. But in general? It's been a lot of "where the heck did that come from" and people telling each other things.

For now I write because I want to write. Eventually that won't be enough and I'll write because I want people to read it. But that comes later.

And there are any number of reasons why finishing this is /totally/ worth it. Not least of which is gloating rights.

[diadelphous.livejournal.com]

4100 words in a day makes you a fucking rock star. I'm serious. That's an awesome word count. You are definitely going to be able to finish this sucker up. When you do, you should print off the pages and look at the big stack of paper and think, I wrote that.

Another option is to set the zoom to like 10% in Word (If you still have Word now that you got a Mac) and look at all the pages laid out on your screen. It's incredibly satisifying.

[jazzfish]

:) thanks. It /is/ a shit-tonne of wordage, both 'in a day' and 'in a month.'

I'm pretty sure there's a way to do that in OpenOffice, once I export the 50,000+ word monstrosity. I will definitely be trying that.

[rbandrews]

4100 words is a lot. Guess the Macbook keyboard has been working out?

I wanted to tell you but I didn't want to interrupt you: last night I played Dominion: Prosperity for the first time. I think the tagline for it should be "Prosperity: where 'gold and a province' is kind of a shit turn™".

[jazzfish]

It's going a lot better once I figured out how to remap the worthless Eject key to be forward-delete. I'm still flailing a bit with navigating and editing, but I'm not doing all that much editing, so it's okay.

Heh. I've not played much Prosperity but that sounds about right.