I have crossed 120K–the approximate length of the original PRIDE & PREJUDICE–and I am firmly within the Novelist’s Event Horizon. I have 3-5 chapters left. I will continue to have 3-5 chapters left until I am suddenly done. This is how it always goes at the end of a book. I’m not quite at the stage of being ready to scream because it’s not yet done, although I’m going to have to wrap it up pretty quick to not get to that stage. This morning on Twitter someone was bemoaning…
Category: Writing
almost there
I don’t know what’s going to come first on this book, 120K or the end. I suspect 120K, as I’m at 113.4 or something now and I have at least two chapters before I can get to the wrap-up, so yeah. Still, I’ve cracked 60K for the year and have had pancakes for dinner, so things can’t be all bad. Also I just got a lovely email from one of the MAGIC & MANNERS patrons saying it had gone far enough off the PRIDE & PREJUDICE rails that she really…
rough start, sterling finish
I got up early(ish) this morning to get an early start on MAGIC & MANNERS, in hopes of reaching the 9.7K I’d have needed for a 15K weekend. Only I opened the Scrivener app and…a full chapter was missing from yesterday’s work. Over 2000 words. I lost my shit. One of Scrivener’s perks is that this is emphatically Not Supposed To Happen, and I honestly still don’t know *what* happened, because there was a conflicting file version from Saturday at 4:45pm, 45 minutes before I even got home from writing,…
too much story or not enough
A common symptom of a writer at work: vacillating between being confident I can bring this book in at 100K and being sure I can’t. On one hand, I’m feeling like if I’m not careful, MAGIC & MANNERS is going to end up *longer* than PRIDE & PREJUDICE. It certainly is if I keep following P&P as closely as I’ve been doing, although it’s also diverging more, so I don’t necessarily have to follow so closely. The second half of P&P has sort of a lot of faffing around with…
Downton X-Men
Not that I need anything else to do in my Copious Free Time, but last night I wasn’t even thinking about my Downton Abbey/X-Men mashup (did I mention that? the other day I had an X-Men/Downton Abbey dream and thought, damn, that could work. WWI-era superheroes, that is, more than actually fitting Downton Abbey to the X-Men (which could also work but I don’t see getting to do that any time soon :)) and I realised I could use that world to do Evil Hat Fred’s “World War G” idea,…