02.03.07
The Home Stretch
This whole post is going to be an update on Inconsequential, so those of you who aren’t following the novel’s progress, you’re excused. The rest of you, stick around, this one’s going to take a while to explain.
First, the hard numbers. I hit 77,000 words and have just 19 scenes left to write, with another two possibly up for rewriting/expanding. If I don’t count those two as being done, that puts me at 75,500 words. The page count is 138 (single-spaced), with five of those being front-matter and day separators. I figure that given a minimum of a page and a half for each scene I’ll hit 170 pages before it’s over. Each scene is about 800 to 1,200 words, so splitting the difference I’ll probably wind up with 95,000 to 97,000 words in the end. I’m still on track.
One of the things that has always been odd about my writing style is that I tend not to want to tell the story in a linear fashion. Of course, when it’s all said and done, the story is linear and does follow a certain progression. Event A in Storyline 1 has to happen before it can trigger Event B in Storyline 2, etc. The problem is that I oftentimes don’t like to write about Event A because I might think, “well, it’s not really all that funny, is it?”. Yeah, the book is a little uneven right now– at least, I think it is. However, that’s part of the challenge to it– I have to find the humor inherent in gathering information or in getting from a video room to a panel room. Sometimes I do it by incorporating a peculiarity of the anime subculture into the narrative, and other times I just have the characters have a conversation that is clearly absurd.
What always surprises me is when I manage to write a scene I didn’t even see coming. For example, one of the plot points involved getting one character to unexpectedly kiss another. I originally figured this would happen with a simple hug going too far, but then the idea of a pair of hand-sewn dolls in the likenesses of the characters involved in the kiss just sort of came to me. Before I realized it, the scene was written. I’m really getting back into actually enjoying writing it.
Or I would be, if today wasn’t the day I decided to do my taxes and found out that I may have made a horrible error. We shall see.
Ismail Saeed said,
02.03.07 at 1:33 pm
Well, that’s certainly progress.
It feells odd to see you talk mathematically instead of talking about stuff like “oh, how to write the ending” or “how to get this situation believable?” (something we did once talk about for another scene)
Speaking of which, the two kissing characters…. do their names start with “Sh” and “Po” ? Are you rewriting that scene?
John said,
02.03.07 at 1:56 pm
Heh heh. No, the two kissers here are not who you think they are.
And really, I’m pretty confident in my ability to tell the story from here on out. Things are flowing much better now then previously.