I count my progress in pages while I’m drafting a new book. Some people use words, but counting words is a little hard for me to wrap my head around. Not sure why, exactly. Page count has always made sense to me. It might be because I spent several years learning to write scripts for Film and TV, and the only counts that make sense for scripts are pages. Maybe?
I wrote 25 of them today.
That’s about 6,500 words. I did a highlight to check.
It’s all downhill from here. Truly. I’ve outlined my All is Lost moment, where the hero realizes they must change their approach against the Villian to salvage some form of victory, and boy howdy…that one is a doozy. Gotta nail it. I spent two weeks, probably, hand wringing over how to handle that part of the story…but once I realized that and put my head down to solve it, it was breakthroughs from there.
I love my story. I love that I’m building to. Working my ass off to make the despair as deep and complete as I possibly can for where I’m at right now in the story, so that when our hero offers a glimmer of hope…we’re yelling and cheering and rattling our sabres for the final fight.
This book is liable to be a good 50-75 pages longer than I thought it was going to be. But, here we are. It’s what the story has dictated to me needed to happen thus far, and if we need to make cuts for pacing, we make cuts. Later. Not now. Now, I just need to tell it from beginning to end.
That’s all I got for you today. It’s all I did. Write write write. And I’m tired, but I’m not exhausted. I wrote downhill today. It wasn’t a grind. I’m not writing crap. I know I’m not. It’s a massive, massive difference.
I’m very grateful.
Night.