Works in Progress #5: The “I Thought I’d Be Done by Now” Update
It’s been over a month since our last check-in, and I’m not currently working on the book so here’s an update. It’s sort of exciting in that this could very well be the last update before the whole draft is finished and then I’ll be sitting on a completed book. Then we can start dragging our feet to edit the darn thing and that’s pretty exciting as well. I love the feeling of guilt for not working on something that I actually want to work on; it’s oddly refreshing.
Anyway, here comes the heading.
Graph Time
Yeah, we’re going straight to the progress graph. The crux of these types of articles coming straight to you. It’s here, right now.
Extra long edition.
Part 3 is shaping up to be quite more of a beast than I thought it would. Right now, I’m still at a building point of all the dominoes that are gonna fall before the end and we’re almost even with all of the action of Part 2. At this rate, we’re probably going to be damn near close to 100,000 words, which isn’t really a problem but it does strike me as a concern for the pacing of this final bit.
Long story short, I probably need to cut a good bit of what’s going on in Part 3 and part of that is on me for taking so long between actively writing.
But hey, look, we expanded the graph to go all the way to 100,000 and that’s pretty neat. Also, on that 100,000 maximum mark, it turns out the word count is a little more flexible when it comes to science fiction and fantasy novels. They get some extra bit of leeway when it comes to a hard word count. Now, there does seem to be a tendency for non-established writers to be expected to follow more of a shorter count than say, Brandon Sanderson, so we’re doing our best not to go over into the realm of excess.
It is still fascinating to me the amount of progress I’ve gotten done despite my mental health being somewhat lacking for creative works lately. If you recall, our original graph looked like this:
Yeah, the new one’s better.
Remember when we were worried about hitting 40,000 words? And also how wrong we were about novel lengths?
That graph was from last September and here we are, a good 70,000+ words later.
Anyway, what’s new?
Uh Oh, More Graphs?
Uh, yeah. So something strange happened to me that hasn’t happened in a while and there’s a new fiction project bouncing around the ole noggin. It happened when I was driving, a particular phrase got stuck in my head and I built a quasi-story outline out from there and before I knew it, I was writing a different story that wasn’t my main novel. This one feels like it’ll be short at least, so there’s that, but here’s a little look behind the curtain at what our fiction projects graph would look like with this new data in mind.
It’s like a previously on. I showed you the first one so I could update it.
Yeah, a tiny baby of a story that’s just sort of coming into its own. The fun part about short stories is they can be sort of any length, as long as it’s around 5000 or so. Online publications tend to like shorter lengths, traditional doesn’t mind unless it’s like 20,000. Don’t do that.
O.D.i.S.i.t.P. is a quasi-sci-fi story but more in the vein of literary fiction than anything else. It’ll be a tonally different piece from G.J. and probably fit more in with the collection that is D.o.L.G., but it’s unwritten as of yet, so all of this remains to be seen. Insert a joke about speculating on speculative fiction here. Okay, I’m not going to do that.
In a way, it’s exciting to have a new story in the rotation. In other ways, it is extremely frustrating to be spending any more time not working on the novel. Because I really want that draft done so I can put it aside for a bit and let my head do anything else.
Current Obstacles
The main difficulty standing in my way as of now is my own brain. The third act of this novel hasn’t been as smooth as the other two Parts and that’s sort of bringing the whole psyche down. Advice I’ve read suggests to jump around at this point and then work backward to connect the separate parts, but the problem is there’s nowhere really left to jump besides the next bit.
When you’re so close to the end, you sort of run out of runway.
The other big obstacle in my life is Mewgenics. For those unfamiliar, Ed McMillen (The Binding of Isaac) has released a new video game that is completely dominating my waking life. It’s a turn-based strategy game (my genre of choice), with rougelike elements (my second favorite genre) involving breeding cats to go to war for you (almost a homerun, I don’t have any feelings about cats, but two out of three ain’t bad). Runs consist of beating battle after battle through different maps with branching routes and at first I thought it was manageable, but each success has revealed yet another map that must be conquered.
So, those two things coupled with life and the everyday struggles of raising a young one are sort of stepping on the neck of my creative endeavors as of now.
If we can somehow get past these, we’ll be golden. I’m not going to keep you here longer than necessary, so this’ll be the end of the update.
If you feel so inclined to remind me to finish my book, please feel free to reach out on instagram. My handle is beararmsandfire for reasons I won’t get into here. Maybe one day I’ll tell that story. Anyway, go forth and conquer.
Or something.
