Jeebus.

[swan_tower]

Today I got started working before five, and knocked out about 1400; then, against my better judgment (I know that slow and steady wins the race), I came back for a second sitting. 2,458 today -- and all before midnight! The first overrun was excusable; I mean, I was three paragraphs away from Jack finally making his entrance. I've been looking forward to him all book. But did I really need to write the rest of that scene today? No. (Not to mention it's a stupidly long scene. Though heck if I know how I can trim it. The tree may have to go away. <sad face>)

I am, however, being vindicated in my decision not to work on revising the earlier parts yet. As I suspected, I am getting to know Antony much better in this part, which will benefit me in the revision. Apparently he's one of those guys who accomplishes more the less you give him to work with. Who knew?


Word count: 50521. That landmark is the other reason for the overrun.
LBR tally: 2,458 words of nearly pure rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: You know what happens when you give somebody a young son in Part I? They're all growed up by Part III, is what.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, the nice thing about a personal deadline is you can adjust it if it turns out you've miscalculated. The first time I finished a novel, I looked back at the run of steady work I'd been doing for a little while, figured out roughly how much I was averaging a day, and set a baseline of wordage -- which for me is 1K. So if you need another 40K words, your deadline is 40 days away. Or maybe you only manage that about five days a week because of personal commitments, so you need 56 days, at 5K per week. And then you tweak as you go -- but you have to make sure you're only moving it because you need to, not because you're lazy and you know it doesn't really matter. (And yes, you can move a deadline up. If you estimate 1K/day and you're rolling steadily at 1500, then by all means -- see if you can't get it done sooner.)

And the result of this is that when you sell your first novel and your editor wants to know how long it will take you to write the next one, you have an idea. You'll want to build padding into whatever you agree on if at all possible -- if it takes you three months of daily work, give yourself four or even five, plus some lead time to get the idea developed -- but you want to know what your own working pace tends to be.

I honestly pity people who sell the first novel they ever write, because they've got no idea what their baseline working habits are, versus the habits they had for that particular book. When I sold Doppelganger, I'd written six books; I knew quite well what my novel-producing pace was.