Works in Progress - Update #2 - The Milestone Update
Hey folks, it’s me, your favorite blogger. Henry. Yeah, okay, I know it’s been a while and maybe there’s some room for forgetfulness, but don’t be rude and demand my name, what the heck?
Ahem, anyway, it’s been more than two weeks without a blog article of some kind, so that means an update post is required. And look at that, it’s got a name. The Milestone Update. I wonder what that could be hinting at? I can only imagine.
Now, for a full behind-the-curtain view, I am writing this update on a Monday and usually I write these at the end of the week once the writing is done, so we can say that the cart is before the horse, folks. It’ll be up to me to make some of the claims in this post happen and in a let’s-just-burn-the-curtain-why-do-we-even-have-it sort of way, I’ll let y’all know if I was successful in making those claims happen.
[Editor burning the curtain because we don’t need it any more here, let’s just say that the milestone was hit the very next day.]
But I ramble, let’s just get to the update.
Part 1 - The Part with the First Graph
It’s impolite to just drop a graph on people, so here’s a bit of a preamble beforehand. Okay, now let’s get to the graph.
Wow, what a good looking graph. And I’m almost not tired of seeing it yet.
Yeah, here’s the milestone. We’re crossing into bare minimum territory with our favorite work in progress G.J. Let’s have a Good Job for G–Oh we did this joke last time, sorry.
It’s kind of exciting in a way. This is the most progress I’ve had on actually completing a novel. That being said, it’s becoming kind of a curse. Any time I feel good about how much progress there’s been, I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m not currently working on it. There’s also been a few moments when I’ve commented on writing and I’m speaking from a perspective that I have finished it, which is almost as dangerous as meth.
Never can I feel as though the work is finished. That just leads to not working on the work.
To that end, this isn’t the only graph we’re getting!
Part 2 - The Part Where I Get Very Pedantic
There is something that needs to be said and I’m the only one who can say it. I’m sure people have been thinking it ever since I first announced that we’re tracking progress by word count, but here it is in plaintext.
Word count does not denote quality writing. I know, it’s a bummer. It would be so nice to get to the end of the process of telling the story of G.J. and just be done. Send it out, call it a day, get published, etc. But the truth of the matter is that the end of the writing phase will begin a vigorous and laborious rewriting phase that becomes less and less tangible in how we are able to measure progress.
I wanted to acknowledge this now before we return to caring about how many words are in a thing in a moment because it’s important to me that I know that you know that I know this.
So before anyone tries to rain on my parade and tell me that just because something is long doesn’t mean it’s good, buddy, I’m beating you to the punch and hitting myself in the face with that fact before you can even make a fist. To quote one of the great works of art from my childhood, “Don’t hit me; I’ll hit me” (Hey Arnold!, “24 Hours to Live”).
The voice of a generation.
Okay, let’s get to the next bit.
Part 3 - The Part with the Second Graph
Since we’ve just been seeing the same graph, I thought I’d break down G.J.’s progress a bit further so we can really see what’s going on within the confines of that earlier data.
For a bit of context, I am writing G.J. linearly. G.J. is broken up into three distinct parts, each part representing a major setting that our protagonist is experiencing. For the sake of mystery, these parts will be referred to as Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. With that understood, let’s take a look at the stuff of dreams as Shakespeare wrote - the word counts of each part.
Yeah, that’s right. We’re finally getting specific with the numbers.
We can see that part 1, ⅓ of the total story content for this novel, is at 27,600 words (rounding to make the number look better). My aim for each of these parts is that they will be pretty equal in content, putting a loose target goal of around 75,000 words for the total, which is well within the 40,000 to 100,000 range.
We can see the part that I am currently working through is at 11,050, so I’m about nearly halfway through that part’s story content. Google Docs is trying to get me to amend that previous sentence to read “about halfway,” but the math doesn’t check out, so I won’t.
All while the total is nearing that ever so fun to hit but ultimately meaningless to the story I’m telling bare minimum of 40,000 words. It’ll be nice to hit that milestone, but ultimately, the story continues until it’s done and this story is going to be a three parter.
It’s fun to look at these numbers. It’s daunting to think about what I have left to write, but it is neat to see how much progress there is and how deep into G.J. I’ve gotten in a relatively short time. I mean, where were we a few weeks ago when I posted my first update? When was that?
September 5th? And we had just over 9000 words then? Crazy. Absolutely crazy to think about.
But here, as we near the end of October, there’s much more to consider.
Part 4 - R.I.P. NaNoWriMo
So, uh, I’m just finding out that National Novel Writing Month was a nonprofit organization that disbanded in April of this year. Apparently they faced both financial troubles as well as some pretty lax child safety protocols for their online community. Bummer.
Regardless, back when I was more terminally online and plugged into the writing community, I would see frequent posts for National Novel Writing Month and would feel guilty I wasn’t participating. Briefly, the aim for the month of November was to write a 50,000 word novel. I’m not sure why this merited a nonprofit organization or even what they did; I thought it was just a sort of online challenge like the ice bucket thing or no shave November or whatever.
So, I’m gonna try it. 50,000 words in November might not fit my exact goals for G.J., and in fact, that might be too lofty a goal for my meek 1500 words every other day sort of pace, but we’re going to try to complete at least Part 2 of G.J. by the end of November. Stay tuned for progress updates or blogs that I write to stave off having to give a progress update in the coming month.
Part 5 - The Part Where This Ends
So, that’s where we stand. Again, I hope for this to be a milestone update, so I’ll work on crossing that 40,000 barrier in the time between finishing this article and posting it on Friday. Wish me luck, I guess, or well don’t because the results will be posted and it’ll all be over already. [WE DID IT, THANKS FOR THE LUCK]
But then, do wish me luck for the upcoming Novel Writing Month endeavor where I’ll aim to be hopefully well into Part 3 of G.J. And if it doesn’t happen, there’s always more time. I’m not on a deadline or anything.
They say you have your entire life to write your first novel. I’m hoping to finish a bit before that, but we’ll see how it all shakes out. For now, thanks for reading. Hopefully this was entertaining. Sorry if it wasn’t. And I’ll see you in a post in the future sometime.
