I’ve decided to start a new post for each day of the four remaining days of the write-a-thon, because it’s only four days and because, hee, I’m excited.
Today, especially, I have reason to be excited. I drafted one and a half scenes and I stopped at a scene break, thinking, “I know what happens next, maybe that’s a good time to stop, so I have something to start with tomorrow. (That’s what Vernor Vinge said he does, and it seems to have been working for me this week.)
Anyway, I added up the words and got a nice little surprise:
“A Killing in Burma�?: 2,878 words
Weekly Total: 10,761 words
Write-a-thon Total: 90,001 words
“A Killing in Burma” is now nowhere near done, at 7,572 words… not even halfway, at least not from what I can tell. I think I’ll just keep drafting and see where it leads me. Hopefully not a novel, since I don’t know enough about Myanmar to pull off such a thing, but I figure if it ends up being 18,000 words, it can always be edited down to 12,000 or 13,000 later on. Better to have too much and struggle to choose what to cut, than to have not enough and struggle with what’s coming next.
The story is turning out to be my own response to the fabber stories of Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling, but as I explore the issue, I find a lot of what one can say about a new tech like this depends on the place it’s being introduced into. In any case, we’ll see where it goes. Probably right off a cliff — but only to continue down the cliff face, undaunted.
In any case, I’ve completed one of my Write-a-thon goals — I’ve written 90,001 words in 39 days, and I’m only 4,300-odd words short of my weekly goal, too. The funny thing? Meeting that latter goal is nothing. What I’m shooting for is the end of the draft by the end of the week. We’ll see if that happens.
For now, I’ll see if I can rope Lime into watching that old comedy Nurse Betty with me. I have some reading to do, too… halfway through Haruki Murakami’s short story collection After the Quake, a quarter of the way through a reprint of the Superman strips from the Sunday Funnies (1939-1943… quite a trip) and there’s the Tom de Haven novel It’s Superman! halfway done, and waiting for me, too. (Links for the books mentioned above can be found in the sidebar, at least while they’re in my reading now or recently read list.)
One more little yelp of fulfillment: Yay!