I am impressive. Sometimes I forget how impressive I am and then I go and do something really impressive.
The final tally was 50,042 words which works out to be, roughly, 80 pages single spaced and 150 double spaced pages. I think I wrote about 8,000 towards the story before, so it's about 58,000 words total thus far. I still need about another 50,000 words I'd guess. Maybe less.
I didn't figure out what the angle on it was until the last two thousand words. It's a pretty simple angle, but hopefully the way it gets there is interesting. Probably not. I haven't gone back and read through it yet, I'm not really looking forward to that process. But the idea is to have a working first draft by the end of March. This means writing the rest of it, putting it into a logical working order, and then doing a sweep through to clean it up. What else? Oh, I have to make it agree with itself. That should be fun because I changed shit as I went.
Some things that need doing in list form:
Writing a chapter called The Third Hunt. Or, deciding enough is enough with the adventure bullshit and going broad strokes with the rest.
Kinda the same as the above: Filling in, or figuring out a reasonable way to make the empty spaces in the timeline matter to the story or dismissing them altogether.
Clean up some of the characterization, make the language work.
Clean up the timeline, or leave it completely vauge. I'm leaning towards vague because I could give a shit about historical innacuracies so long as nobody in the 20s is on a cell phone; which were not invented until the early 30s, when dick tracy invented the two way wrist radio. Fact.
A chapter in which the main character does something, anything really. I got a little carried away with the old man and you, the reader, has no real reason to feel any empathy towards the grand son. But, the grandson would be annoying to spend time with, so really, this might just be a grand excercize in making him irritating and sad. Possible solutions: Hit him in the nuts with a golf ball, hit him in the face with a paint can, perhaps optimially, slip on a banana peel and fall down open elevator shaft, and fall onto, surprisingly, a pile of pillows but then be crushed by the elevator, or more humorously, a baby grand piano or VW Bug.
Throughout, I call the grandfather The Old Man and do not name him. This is not a stupid affectation, I just couldn't think of a good name. I like the idea of it but would like for it not to come across, as I think it will, as a stupid affectation. Similarly, The Guide is called The Guide and a few other characters in the Old Man's area are just called by what they are. It's a little character heavy in parts and I kinda like the "My name is my fucnction" because you don't care what their names are and it's just something to be forgotten and fumbled over later. So while not an affectation, it is in most cases purely functional in addition to being purely lazy. This paragraph all by itself has convinced me to not change this. Thanks, paragraph.
I think I had some other thoughts but have been distracted.
Anyway. I'm going to put it aside for a week or so and forget about it so I can look at it a little bit fresh and start again. If you'd like to read it, I don't think I'm going to put it up here, let me know and I'll send it to you. Actually, I'm not sure of that either. I don't know about any of it. Anyway. Before my next post, please feel free to be impressed with how impressive I am. I do it all for you.
The next thing will be up soon, hopefully.
Godspeed, minions.
