The good news is that, six months after taking a hiatus from Jack and two weeks after beginning and finishing a reread and midstream edit, I finally wrote a new chapter yesterday. It's a hard drudge right now. I'm actually at ~64,000 words which is not a small amount, though actually only counts as a small book by most peoples lights. However, outlining the story out, I'm at 64,000 words on chapter 26 and there are 41 proposed chapters, sooooo... I have a little farther to go.
That means, conservatively, that I'll probably hit 100,000 words or so. Once I'm done there, I'll go in and cut a bunch of stuff. My challenge, as someone who doesn't know how to write a novel, is that I'm afraid the book is going to lag during expositional pieces. I've got two characters that I like a lot, Jack and Jill, but that means providing background for both and that can run long sometimes. The stuff I wrote about Jill, especially, seems very long but that's probably because I like her better. If the dreaded lag proves to be real, (I'm going to need an impartial reader to tell me if that's so.) I may have to choose a person to...not destroy, that's not the correct word. Perhaps, amputate? Yes, I may have to amputate someone's background and maybe use it for something else or never use it at all. I'll have to wait and see. I don't know how other people who pretend to write feel about it, but I generally love everything I've written for about 3 months after I'm finished, later I decide that I hate it, but for that first 3 months or so, it's awful hard to cut stuff. It needs to be done, just like pruning your roses and, in the end, it makes for a much better story, but, boy, is it painful to do. Anyway, on tempo...
You'd think it was easy to determine the tempo of the book since I'm the one writing it, but it's not that simple. (Maybe it is for other writers? Eeek.) I spend so much time building the story, rewriting, moving stuff around, getting new ideas, deciding to axe old content, etc. that I can get hung up in certain parts of the story longer than in others. This leads to that section feeling like it's realllllllly long when, in fact, it may read short. I'll just say...it plays merry hell with your time sense. The quick answer, you say? Read it without editing, you say?
Hard to do. When I write something, I read it in the way that I intended to write it. In other words, I struggle to misunderstand it. New readers, fresh readers, have an innate ability to misunderstand my writing. They make it look effortless, hah. Sometimes I can find the distance from the text to discover errors, to make sharp changes and to be honest about content but usually that only comes with letting the text sit unreviewed for a while, long enough for me to forget what I wrote. If I want to keep forward momentum, I have to reach out to others to read. The trick there?
A. Getting them to read it. If you're married to or happen to be the sibling of an aspiring writer, you'll know what I mean when I say that it gets tiring reading other people's stuff, especially when it's in the forming stage. It's hard to read the same thing over and over and over again. So, finding a trusted reader who's not buried in their own lives at the moment and has the energy to actually spend hours doing a chore for you can be a herculean task.
B. Getting them to be honest. It's hard to get people to tell you that your baby is ugly. The truth is, though, without that kind of feedback, the baby stays ugly. (I am aware that this is a pretty bad analogy. First, people never want to be told that their baby is ugly. Second, if your baby is ugly there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Third, my wife tells me that there is no such thing as an ugly baby and that I'm really a jerk for thinking so. Having said all of that, use your own baby-less analogy. I'm okay with that.)
So, in short, I'll be looking for readers soon. Hopefully, by...the end of July? We'll see.
The photo? Bricks. From Fort Smith. Fort Smith is a cool town. Cool enough to elevate this blog entry so that those who aren't reading it will have something nice to look at.
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