Results of Ruminations

WOOHOO! I did it! By 5:15, I had knocked out a couple hundred more words than I needed to actually hit my goal. I officially have 250,288 words in Writ in Blood . Awesome. Today, when I sat down, I had just under 5,000 words to crank out. Knowing how close I was to getting my goal, I admit that I checked my word count more often than I usually do. It's kind of like waiting for midnight on New Year's Eve--there's very little that's immediately different on one side of the even than the other, but part of the fun is the anticipation. So I knocked down one chapter (more on that later) and, feeling upset at what I'd just done, I decided to create a flashback for Nic in the prior chapter. That came out fairly easily--which worries me, as I don't trust myself when things go too right for too long--and, by and by, I finished my goal. Just like that. With 250,000 words (oh, for a dollar per word, I tell ya) in the rear view mirror, where do I go from here? Well, ...

On Endings Today's output put me just over the 4100 word mark, which is gratifying and really quite unexpected. This also puts me just below 5,000 words to hit my goal of 250,000 total. So, yeah. I'm definitely going to make the goal by my birthday in April. In fact, I might hit it this next writing session, depending on how everything goes. (Fingers crossed. Hitting my goal = eating out at a nice restaurant with the missus, which I love to do.) Today's work was broken into an inversion of the typical process, which happens so often that I guess it's not really an inversion at all. I try to do the narratological present chapter first, advancing the main plot before filling in back story. This is done for two reasons: 1) It makes more sense to write in the order that people read the story; 2) if a main chapter is too short, I can use the flashback to pull the word count up. Admittedly, if I write a flashback later, it still can pull up the word count, but I dislike l...