Monday, January 7, 2008

Forward Motion

So I haven't posted a progress update since December 20th. I haven't actually written anything new since before that time, but as I have mentioned I read Stephen King's On Writing, and am currently still in progress with Chris Roerden's Don't Murder Your Mystery. I'm learning a lot from these two books, and naturally, the tendency is to want to go back and revise yet again with all the various new things that I've learned.

So that's what I did over the holiday break, in those few spare moments -- I worked over my first chapter again, and also worked on a couple of specific spots that came later on in. Tonight I realized what was happening, however, and decided to put those revisions on hold. If I keep revising as much as I have been so far, I'll never finish my first draft at all. So instead of revising Chapter 2, I jumped ahead to chapters 9 and 10, and revised both of them. This is in preparation for tomorrow, when I'll actually write new scenes for chapter 10 (I always have to do some revision of the preceding scene if there's been a gap of more than a few days in my writing, just so that I get back into the flow/mindset of that last scene I wrote).

In all, through this time I've managed to lose about 200 actual words, and no pages (so no estimated words, either). Still, I'm really pleased with those edits that I have made -- and also that there were so many things that were already "right," or at least close to it, that I didn't have to change.

The stats as of today:
-47,250 estimated words.
-55,302 actual words.
-Nine and a portion fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (155 pages total).
-189 pages in all.
-Song(s) listened to while writing: Meet the Robinsons soundtrack

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