Posted 25 Apr 2017 drafting editing science fiction
There are six days, including today, left of Camp NaNoWriMo, and according to my original goal of 115K words, I have just under 13K to go. My actual final count may end up being a bit lower than that, based on where I am in the revisions now and how much padding I've done to date. There's a chance I'm going to end up adding a bit more to the denouement, but I'm fairly certain the highest word count I could expect at this point is between 108-110K. Not a problem, and it only affects the arbitrary goal I set myself. There's one open thread I could still tie off, but again I expect that would only take a paragraph in some epilogue-ish new text and it'd be settled. Assuming I didn't already include that (I tend to do that... think I've omitted something important, add in the new text, and then discover in the following sentences I had a handle on it and I should trust myself a little more). So, since my last Camp update on the 18th, I've covered about 20K's worth of ground. Most of this was made up over the weekend, as I failed to make any significant progress Thursday/Friday of last week, because of distractions and mental rotaries and roundabouts. This weekend I have no chance of making similar progress, as it's my birthday and we have plans, though we did cancel an unnecessary trip to Ikea, planned when we were going to meet friends at my favorite restaurant (that got canceled as the restaurant has a ticketed musical event the same night and sold out all their tables ahead of time). So instead we'll be smoking, roasting, grilling, and frying meat all day. I enjoy cooking, so I'm not upset, and it only shifts the forms my non-writing distractions will take. I will catch up on Sunday as best I can. For those of you who follow along with my health stuff, next week I will be trying a 5-day fast. I think I'm going to need it for emotional and spiritual reasons. April has been quite a ride. In addition to the revision of Book 2, I'd like to do some work on Flotsam before that moves into its production phase in May. There's a new detail that's occurred to me that I believe will strengthen the story, and I got some feedback on other bits that could be stronger that I have to figure out. I'm also, as you may know, planning to rein in the language of my stories. I was torturing myself last week trying to come up with a "glossary" of expletives, but finally decided that the way I'd modified the book to send my grandfather a "ladylike" version of the story is the right way to do it: case-by-case, context-based, and in a way that feels right for that moment and how that character is feeling. If they end up delightfully visual (like the translations of Firefly's Mandarin outbursts), so be it, but I'm not going to hold back the story, paralyzed by a need to prove how clever I am. Then, I want to start training my new Dragon Dictation software so that I can give a go of dictating some future story drafts. I'm halfway set up to do that, and am really curious how it'll work out. Hoping I can walk on nice mornings and on my lunches, even while driving, and get story work done at the same time. Not sure what that'll mean for the format of Asimov Hour. Speaking of my YouTube videos, I also plan to weekly record a "TL;DR" version, just to recap the work and updates from each week. I'll probably do those on Sundays (to end each week on a boosted word count high note). I think that's all the updates I have for you right now. Next week I'll recap the whole month (and let you know how our smoked brisket turns out).Next Snippet: Gallery