Month: July 2009

140 a day for 75 days

I’ve been posting my second line-a-day story now for 75 days. Chapter one is 28 lines, chapter two is 9 lines, and as of today, chapter three is 38 lines.

I’ve been writing the story in bursts of between 10 and 20 lines at a time, and then posting them one line a day. This evening I wrote the last 20 lines of chapter three. The story is the story of a Father’s struggle to not hold on too tight to his daughter so he can still be in her life, and a daughter who is trying to prove she can make it on her own.

I don’t know where this story came from, or why I’m writing it. But as I write it I feel it deeply. For some reason I care about these characters even more than the ones in my novel. Annay has gone through some pretty tough struggles so far in the 85,000 words of the book, but so has Jill in the 75 lines of this story.

After finishing the twenty lines that I wrote this evening, which took about an hour to write, I feel drained and sad. Perhaps depressed would be a better word. As it turns out I’m was writing a very intense part of my book this weekend, and I think they may have added together. Well, I’ve got almost three weeks before I have to visit Jill and Bob again.

The other connection to make between these two books and my life comes from last Sunday evening. Most Sundays I meet with a friend and talk about how I’m doing with the lost of my son. We talk about all sorts of stuff: memories, lost dreams, struggling to keep going, finding motivation to keep going to work, how my other kids are doing, how my wife is doing.

This last week we talked about what were some of the other things we needed to talk about. One of the things I brought up was that I thought I wasn’t dealing with my emotions enough. In the first few months after his death, I cried a lot and I missed him a lot. Now its been a year and a half. I still miss him, and I still get angry sometimes, but I don’t really feel anything. I think that it is not so much that I don’t feel anything, but that I won’t allow myself to feel it.

And that’s were the tie-in comes. I think that in someway I am feeling through the characters in my stories. I’m not going through the same things that they are, but I am feeling the same kinds of things. And as I write, I let it out through my characters. I am making them hurt so I will feel their pain, which is the pain I think I should be feeling myself.

Is this a healthy way to deal with my own emotions. I’ll let you know, but for now, after I force myself through the low, I do feel better. I just wonder if it is making my stories better or just darker.

80,000

With a rush of adrenalin, I wrote the set up for the final battle and then wrote the final battle. I finished late last night – late for me anyway. It took 5,000 words to do the final battle, so I’m at 80,000.

I hoped that today I would be able to write a bunch more, but I don’t seem to have it in me. It kind of feels like a did a 50 yard dash, and now I’m winded.

Maybe it is that I’m not sure which part to write next. Do I write the aftermath or go back and write some of the parts I skipped. I’m torn between just wanting to be done with the first draft and knowing that there is more of the story I need to tell.

I think I need to go back and shake some of the threads I haven’t fully developed so I will know better how the end needs to wrap everything up.

75,000 words

I don’t know what it about round numbers that are significant to people. Last night I hit 75,000 words in my novel. I also hit 73,000 and 74,000 last night, but when I got to 75,000 it felt like I had reached some place and I could stop. Actually when I was at 74,123 and it was time to go to bed, I couldn’t stop, or rather didn’t want to stop.

I was on a roll and I convinced myself that I couldn’t stop. I needed to get the words out. Today I paid the price, trying to focus at work without enough hours of sleep. Now that I’ve reached 75,000 words it feels like the next milestone is 80,000, then 90,000 and 95,000, and final 100,000. Where will I be when I’m done? I’m not sure. I’m writing fairly short chapters, my outline says a total of 92 chapters and I’ve written 63, which should put me at 2/3 of the way through, or 75,000 of 112,500.

I guess that feels about right. I’ll probably drop a few of the chapters in my outline, but I know there are pieces missing from the chapters I’ve already written – mostly Annay’s journal entries. If a 112,500 words is the target, what are the milestones after 100,000? 110,000 and goal to go.

I looked back at my twitter entries and I was at 50,000 April 15th, so 25,000 words in three months. I’m going to really try and get done by the end of summer. That would be 10,000 a week, with a little room to slip. I guess I should stop blogging and start writing. I’ve got 1:15 before warehouse 13 is on.