{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
  "title": "oh-no-this-monster-is-going-to-be-over-100k on Ron Toland",
  "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2023/08/1354222.jpg",
  "home_page_url": "https://mindbat.ca/",
  "feed_url": "https://mindbat.ca/feed.json",
  "items": [
      {
        "id": "http://mindbat.micro.blog/2021/02/12/keeping-score-february.html",
        "title": "Keeping Score: February 12, 2021",
        "content_html": "<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This book may end up being much longer than I thought.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It's currently at 29,122 words, which is almost half of the 70K or so I thought it would end up being. The trouble is, I'm not even close to being halfway done.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The section I'm working on now, just by itself, is 16,000 words long. And it's not near done, either. I'm maybe....halfway? through the story I want to tell in this part of the book. And this section is only meant to be about one-fourth of the whole, so that would put the final word count at around 120,000 words (!)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That would make it a third longer than the longest thing I've ever written in my life. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I swear, I'm not eating up word count spinning needless metaphors or having characters do a lot of navel-gazing. It just turns out that yes, when writing a novel that moves from the lakes and forests of northern Sweden to the neverending sky of the Central Asian steppe, there's a lot of, um, ground to cover. Who knew? (Narrator: <em>He</em> did. Or should have).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Granted, a lot of what I'm writing now might be cut out. Some of it is no doubt redundant, or can be compacted so that the events of a few pages get covered in a few paragraphs. But even lopping off 20,000 words of filler would make this a 100K book. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>100K is about 400 pages, which...well, that's a commitment, isn't it? For reader and writer alike. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So much for being done with the first draft before April. This might end up taking me the rest of the <em>year</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it's time to look at bumping my daily word count? Trying to squeeze in a second writing session in each day? Or I could start writing on the weekends again. Just two extra days of my regular word count would be an extra 500 words a week.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or perhaps it's best to be patient. Work on this draft during the week, like I have been, and use the weekend to edit other stories (and that previous novel, which needs a tune-up before going out).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What about you? What do you do, when a story you're working on starts to look like it'll be much longer than you anticipated?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n",
        "date_published": "2021-02-12T16:00:00+00:00",
        "url": "https://mindbat.ca/2021/02/12/keeping-score-february.html",
        "tags": ["Personal","Writing","writing-process","novels","writing-craft","fantasy-novels","Writing Circle","writing-community","long-novels","oh-no-this-monster-is-going-to-be-over-100k"]
      }
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}