After a long, scary, hard pregnancy my cousin, The Kite, finally had the baby: it’s a girl, 7lbs, 5oz and 21 inches long with a shock of thick, dark hair and a wail to match the outrage of being born.
Archives for November 2004
Victory is sweet
It’s not finished. My characters are in limbo and I can feel them standing on the edge of something big, something life changing. Nevertheless, I made word count and completed my first National Novel Writing Month learning a lot about myself as a person and a writer in the process.
A few statistics:
- Number of chapters: 20 (so far)
- Number of secrets revealed: 2 (and counting)
- Total word count to date: 50,605
- Number of random historical research questions I’ve asked my mother: 30+
- 50,000nth word: of (sad, but true)
The goal is to finish the rough draft, which is what this is, before the end of the year.
Time to get a bit of sleep now, I think, give my eyes a rest, and catch up on some TV.
41,139 words later
and I still think I’m a talentless hack.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with me but here’s hoping there’s some drugs for it or something.
The book is actually going pretty well. It looks like my story line is going to exceed 50,000 words, though I’m still not sure about that yet. I’ve got a lot of stuff planned and I’m slightly past the half-way mark which is where what happened in the last 2,000 or so words should have happened.
Number of Chapters: soon to be 18
Number of pounds gained: still 0, thankfully
Number of emotional crises weathered: 4 3 (depression is a real bitch sometimes)
Number of secrets revealed: 1, possibly 2 (it needs some editing)
Paranoia and publication rights
<sigh>
Sadly, the novel-in-blog experiment has come to an end as I’ve been gripped by writer paranoia again (I knew I should have gone with my gut instincts and never even put the thing online) with relationship to something called “first publication rights.”
Now, I don’t believe that putting any or all of a rough draft, NaNoWriMo novel into Movable Type and publishing it as 30 separate blog entries would preclude getting a dead-tree publisher to buy it but, as they say, better safe than sorry (copyright and future sales being one of the instances in which I believe that it is better to ask permission than forgiveness).
That being said, I’ve password protected the book so if you want to read it give me a shout: woodstockdc AT yahoo.com and if you ask nicely, I’ll give you a username and password.
Total word count to date: 27,757
Pounds gained: 0
Emotional crises weathered: 3
Real people I’ve borrowed for characters: 1 (hope you don’t mind, Carrie, I borrowed your librarian)