If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.)
Well, the good news first! I picked up another sponsor (yay!), and I definitely fulfilled my pledged words.
I managed to write:
- 27.062 words on my novel,
- ~5,000 words on a nonfiction project that sort of suddenly occurred to me one evening. (A sort of combination expat biography/cultural comparison book, basically a more intelligent version of this book.)
- A quick, but complete, edit of problematic chunk of a feature film script I’ve had sitting around, waiting for a once-over, which I plan on entering in the screenplay competition of an upcoming film festival. (~500 words)
- Revising a couple of poems, during a brief break from fiction. Yep, poems.
All in all, that’s not bad: it adds up to approximately 32,600 words, which is a productive week by anyone’s standards, I think. (Well, almost anyone’s. I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t manage to hit 30,000 words this week on the novel alone.)
It’s been a busy week, though, so this doesn’t represent anything like the maximum output I could achieve. I sank about twenty-five hours this week into various job-hunt related tasks, which is to say, I probably could easily have gotten another 15,000 words out this week, except I was looking for a job. Still, what I did manage to write isn’t bad at all.
As for progress on the novel itself, it’s been a very good week. Those 27,000-odd words are pretty much Part II of the book. I’ll probably have to slow down for a day or two while I firm up my plans for Part I, since I’ve been writing this backward: Part III, then Part II, then Part I. (Part IV will be last.) Part I is likely to be slightly shorter, but I’m already up to 117,000-odd words total, which makes me think this book is going to be a bit of a whopper once it’s finished.
Anyway, here are the previous progress reports, for those keeping track:
2014 Clarion West Write-a-thon: