A couple days ago, I finished writing through the material I’d written for Worlds Away From Home back in 2008 before I dropped the project. For the first time since March, I find myself drafting entirely new material.
It’s a little bit unnerving; I’m a much better reviser, I feel, than straight up writer. Revising is awesome because I know that the book is getting better, whereas drafting is frustrating because the written story never turns out as awesome as it was when it was in my head.
At the same time, it’s really fun to play fast and loose with your book. Need a new character? Throw him in! A new romantic subplot? Go for it! A new planet for the characters to visit? Sure, why not?
I will say, though, that it’s much harder to keep up a steady writing rate when you’re drafting new material. My daily word count has fallen to about 2k, give or take a few hundred words. In order to finish this by August 15, I just need to do 2.2k per day, but I’m sure something will come up and I’ll find myself in a crunch by the end.
One thing that might throw a kink in the works is getting a new job. Being underemployed really sucks, and I want to move on to a new job by the beginning of August. Easier said than done in this economy, right? Well, there are some options open to a young, single college grad in my position: namely, a wilderness job. I’ve been holding out on that because eight days in the wilderness for every six days off seems like a lot of time away from other pursuits, but the more I look at it, the more appealing it seems. Six days completely off, with no money problems…hmm…
Which reminds me: would it be lame to put up a donate button on this blog? One that said “buy me a (non-alcoholic) drink” or something like that? I don’t want to ask for money, but if you guys feel like throwing it at me, who am I to hold you back? I don’t expect it to earn much, but something is better than nothing, especially these days.
I think there was a David Farland email about how every writer should have a donate button on their site. Who knows, OLL, maybe a millionaire will read your story in the Leading Edge and be moved to tears, and decide to slap you a thousand bucks? (Did you include you web site in your bio??)
Here’s something I’ve always been wondering. You’re often going through a month of revising a book, but you’ll say things like “3,000 words for today” or whatever–what does that mean when you’re revising? I mean, does that mean you wrote 3,000 extra words into your story? How do you count that up? Often revising for me will entail adding two words in one sentence, taking out three sentences, moving a paragraph there, add fourteen words there, add another twenty-seven words on the next page… and so on. I’m just curious how you actually count all that up. (Revision goals for me are never word count goals for this reason… I’d be spending an hour or two just figuring out how many words I added.)
Also, good luck getting the wilderness job if you go for it. I imagine you’d get some inspiring writing material from it, at the very least.
A few weeks ago I pretty much abandoned revising entirely. Oh, sure, I spellcheck, fix major plot holes, make sure there aren’t plasma rifles in the middle of a high fantasy tale… a guy can get carried away, sure. But I just can’t hold myself back from all the new ideas clamoring for attention within the darkened walls of my brain. Besides, I find that revising can be a real kill-joy for a story that was a blast to write in the first place!
Nonetheless: to each his own. Good luck with your project!
-bn
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. I started this novel in 2008, wrote for about four months, and stopped in the middle because the story wasn’t working. In between now and then, I figured out how to fix it, but it required overhauling everything that I’d written up to that point. I just finished overhauling the old material, and now I’m into the new territory. But as for the stuff I’ve just finished going through, I’m not revising it until this draft is finished.
And Cholisose, when I revise, I calculate my wordcount based solely on how much material I’ve covered since the beginning of the day. It’s not the most accurate way, I suppose (since if I cut out an entire paragraph, it counts as 0–and conversely, if I barely touch up another paragraph, it counts everything), but it’s an easily measurable number. When I still had access to MS Word, I used the “compare documents” function to figure out a more precise number (which usually was larger than with the other method), but I haven’t figured out how to do that with open office.