Saturday Update:
The Innsmouth Fatwa: 895 words (draft complete at 5,515 words)
The Truth About Mughals: 5,340 words
Weekly Total: 15,076 words
Write-a-thon Total: 64,146 words
I’m not sure how far I’m going to get with To the Happy Country. I’m beginning to think it’d work better to draft the thing as five or six separate novellas and then stitch them together.
However, in the meantime, I did bang out the end of The Innsmouth Fatwa (which I rethought during my mountain hike and expanded a little, though, yes, sometime it shall endure a thousand cuts, though hopefully not the death of a thousand cuts). Since I found myself completely stalled on To the Happy Country… — and I’m on the verge of declaring myself finished with it for the present, or at least for another week — I managed to write the majority of a new short story, though one I’d thought up a week or two ago. “The Truth About Mughals” has nothing to do with mughals or India at all. I’m gonna need to get some help on British teenager diction, but anyway, the story and even the voice seem to be working at least a little. Lime read the first page aloud and laughed a lot, surprised at how I somehow managed to shape a disenchanted teenaged girl’s voice.
One thing, though: while I am trying to be strict on not banking words on a week-by-week basis, I swear: when I hit 90,000 words, I’m stopping. I don’t care if it’s next Friday, or the Sunday after, or whether it takes until Saturday night of Week 6. As soon as I’m at 90,000 words, I’m gonna stop, and I’m not gonna write anything for a while after that. I think I may just go off the computer altogether for a few days.
Well, we’ll see about that. But there is a LOT of reading I have to do, and I’d like to get started on it. Plus a readings package for a class next semester, and… oh, never mind.
Week 4 done. Two more to go.