Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

Here’s a quick update on my 61k/36days mod of NaNoWriMo…

I’m around 11k words for the week so far. That’s fantastic for me. I don’t think I’ve hit that kind of word count since the final push for the first draft of Amity two years ago. The Amity final push was only 35k in a month. I don’t remember the exact week by week breakdown of the Amity push. I would have not even known then, remember, I wrote my first novel by hand so I could write at work when I was on third shift. There were a whole bunch of things that made hand writing a novel a special kind of hell, not least of all, no word count, just a rough estimation. Which ended up being overestimated by 20k when I was done. Amity was kind of short.

Anyways. According to my Calendar of Doom, at this very second, I am 5k behind getting Murphy Minute done by my birthday. Twice this week I fell asleep on my couch when I was putting my kiddo to bed. Twice more I started dozing off at the keyboard well before my 1.8k daily word goal. It’s not easy to write a lot of words with a two year old. He was an infant when I wrote the last book and small enough to fall asleep on me while I typed.

Rather than getting really annoyed with myself over not getting enough done, I like to think I’m doing pretty damn good at reminding myself that 10k in a week is probably one of the best weekly wordcounts I’ve ever had.

How’s the rest of In A Murphy Minute going?

Well, I think it’s solid. A lot more solid than Amity ever was.

Remember how a while back I scrapped 12k words, genderflipped my protag and restarted the whole thing? When I did, I also pushed back the timeline of the opening chapter and replotted the whole thing. Finally, after all this time (and triple the word count) I’ve gotten the Amina version past where the Cole version stopped. The basic framework of the plot stayed exactly the same and since I’ve started the Amina version, I’ve made her a lot less abrasive and expanded the role of some secondary characters. I’ve gone off the rails of the outline a few times, in part because of the changes Amina’s character has gone through.

The novel is stronger for all of that.

One of problems I did not see with Amity after it didn’t sell, was that I tend to rush from one big moment to the next without stitching them together well. I’ve seen this in short stories of mine too. Certain chapters of Murphy Minute are like pulling teeth because I want to rush off to the next important conversation or the fight scene or concert with Amina on stage. There’s a car chase I’ve been looking forward to writing for years. But I can’t rush. I can’t leave holes in the book like I did last time. I’ve seen it early enough to fix it this time around without wasting all my queries and getting a fist full of rejections.

But stitching those chapters together is a pain in the ass.

Which is why I’ve been screwing around on the blog for the last twenty minutes instead of writing new words.

Sounds like I’m in store for one of my patented “Dear Future Me (Present You), I’m dropping the ball on you cause I don’t wanna do it. Sucks to be you. Signed, Present Me (Past You)”