{"id":111,"date":"2007-12-26T03:11:19","date_gmt":"2007-12-26T09:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=111"},"modified":"2007-12-26T03:11:19","modified_gmt":"2007-12-26T09:11:19","slug":"1703-words-for-a-grand-total-of-61199-oh-and-merry-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/1703-words-for-a-grand-total-of-61199-oh-and-merry-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"1,703 words for a grand total of 61,199. Oh, and Merry Christmas."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christmas was an awesome day!\u00a0 It was also a very busy day, but very good.\u00a0 Even though it was busy, I could have written a lot more a lot earlier, but as usual I kept putting it off.\u00a0 And also as usual when I <em>did<\/em> stop putting it off, I really got into the story and had fun with it&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really excited with this scene.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a conversation between Elijah and Leila, and it starts to show how Ian is getting dragged into the court intrigue, as well as drawing out Leila&#8217;s anxieties about her father trying to marry her off and her inner desires to go off and explore the world, have adventures and all that stuff.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, stuff came to me in the act of writing that I didn&#8217;t even think of when I planned out this part of the story.\u00a0 I&#8217;m starting to get excited to see how the novel is going to end.\u00a0 As of now, I really have no clue.\u00a0 It&#8217;s going to be just as much a surprise to me as to any of my readers.<\/p>\n<p>I just hope I can finish the rough draft by April like I wanted.\u00a0 It&#8217;s already over 61,000 words, but it&#8217;s <em>still<\/em> not quite halfway finished.\u00a0 I still have at least one character that I want to introduce, and I have a lot of work to do on my other characters as well.\u00a0 I want to show how they meet their challenges and change, but none of them has really started to change at all.\u00a0 Except maybe Ian, but I haven&#8217;t figured out how.<\/p>\n<p>I was chatting with this one girl from the writing group the other night, and asked her what she thought a good maximum length for a novel was (I&#8217;m kind of nervous about this, can you tell?) and she gave a really good answer.\u00a0 She said that a good novel is exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story.\u00a0 That makes good sense, both on a gut level and as a general rule.\u00a0 So that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to stick to as I write this novel.<\/p>\n<p>So, Merry Christmas everyone!\u00a0 Hope you had a marvelous day!\u00a0 I sure did.\u00a0 And now, since it&#8217;s past 4am over here in Massachusetts, I am going to bed&#8230;right&#8230;now&#8230;zzzzzzzzzzzz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christmas was an awesome day!\u00a0 It was also a very busy day, but very good.\u00a0 Even though it was busy, I could have written a lot more a lot earlier, but as usual I kept putting it off.\u00a0 And also as usual when I did stop putting it off, I really got into the story&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/1703-words-for-a-grand-total-of-61199-oh-and-merry-christmas\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">1,703 words for a grand total of 61,199. Oh, and Merry Christmas.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-the-lost-colony","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}