Pretty Good on Paper

I updated the text on this site consistently, and so surfing through here I found some more sections I was missing from the master document I just printed out.  Now my count matches the NaNoWriMo computers within fifty words.  So I’m going to call that close enough.  Except that I’m going to break 45,000 today if I have to write nonsense to do it.  Why do we so love round numbers?

Taking advantage of the holiday to work on this NaNoWriMo novel a little bit.  The people at NaNoWriMo started up their official word counting robots and I see that somewhere I must have lost a chapter or part of one or something.  When I woke up this morning I thought I had 42500 words or so, but when I uploaded my file it counted at 39,000 or so.  So I took a quick look and noticed that I had not added the latest file.  That took it a little closer, but I’m still missing maybe 1,500 words from my own calculations. 

I’m thinking about going back and reading everything to see what might be missing.  And then I’m thinking that I should avoid that at all costs so that I don’t get too disgusted by what I have produced so far.  And even worse, what if I really am 1,500 words shorter than I thought and I am crippled by self-criticism. 

Ah, the life of the paperback writer. 

Well, here we are with a holiday weekend to look forward to, and my big worry today is, will I be able to finish this thing?  I know now that I will have no problem hitting 50,000 words, but the more I write, the more wrinkles appear in this novel that must be ironed out before the end.  I really don’t want to go too far past 50k on this first draft.

I know that are those out there who wish they had this problem, and I know it is not really much of a problem.  Yes, I am thankful that I was able to do this thing.  I will take tomorrow off and enjoy the company of some really nice people.  Hopefully I’ll get to catch part of the National Dog Show. 

I wrote 1,624 words tonight.  They are in chapter 11 here.

Definitely harder to write now that I’m laying out the denoument and heading towards the climax of the story.  Only 1,452 words today.  Thanks, everyone for your encouraging words as I hit the final stretch here.  It makes a difference.  It really does. 

To all of my fellow NaNoWriMo massochists, I tip my hat.  Looking at the output of some of my favorite writers I notice that many of them must have written only a page or so each day.  So it’s the sticking with it part that it really important here. 

When I write non-fiction stuff, the only thing I have any real experience with, I spend maybe three-quarters of the time, maybe more than that, revising.  If this novel goes that way, too, I’d be looking at revising it December through February.  Does anyone out there have an estimate they would like to share about the amount of time they spend editing/revising compared to writing the first draft of a fictional piece?  I mean unless it is going to make me depressed. . . .

I’m feeling a little tired of the NaNoWriMo thing today.  I really had a lot of trouble getting into the writing, even after I had put about a thousand words down.  I guess some days it is going to be like this.  Anyway, 2430, I think, was the number I finally got to.  It may have been a little easier towards the end. 

I’m kind of looking forward to writing something else next week.  Or even not writing something else.  This sometimes takes a lot of energy. 

It’s a shame, really.  I really like Roman Numerals, but they just don’t do well in blogsville.  They look so stately and serious and important.  But order is more important, I suppose. 

Novels, for me and other people who like to read in a linear sort of way and very quickly, should probably be presented in chronological order.  The only novel I really liked and can remember at the moment that was not in chronological order was Slaughterhouse Five.  Wait a minute, Infinite Jest, too.  There are probably others.  I’m not quite awake yet. 

Anyway, Chapter IX starts here.

So I wrote chapter IX tonight, a whopping 3,026 words, and then published it.  And then I published it again because I couldn’t find it on my site and WordPress insisted that it was indeed published and then I noticed that WordPress does not instinctively know how to order Roman Numerals. 

So right now Chapter IX is filed right next to chapter IV, which makes some sort of sense out there in computer world.  So I’m going to have to leave it there for the time being, until I can figure out what to do about that.  I mean, all of the chapters have links that take you to the next one in the story.  If I go to Arabic numbers I’ll have to change all of the links, too, right?  It’s too late in the evening for me to figure out how to fix this, apparently. 

So, I’m finally getting to the more fast-paced section of the book, hopefully heading for a conclusion at something not too far from the 50,000 word mark.  I have been taking the chapters and putting them in one large word document and gradually putting it into a book format over the last few days.  As I did this I noticed that the word count in the document is somewhat less than I have gotten by adding each day’s totals and entering it into the NaNoWriMo unofficial counter.  It is about 1400 words short, now.  I don’t know what the deal is, but I hope it is just a chapter being left out or something like that.  But I never wrote anything that small, either.  So I’m either going to have to go back over the whole thing to check and see what I left out, or I’m going to have to go well over the 50,000 mark to ensure completion.  At the moment reading what I’ve already written and checking it against the final document, etc., is the more unappetizing prospect.  And I think it would actually take longer than pumping out an additional 1500 or so words. 

The rest of Chapter VIII can be found somewhere in the menu at the right.