Wordcount 5/22

RF: 35,000 words / 68 pages

So. I've finally hit my goalpost, and the end is definitely in sight. The first draft should finish within about a thousand words, depending on how long the ending scenes end up being.

My sister told me, "Wow, you finished this story so quickly!" I guess, compared to EK and Artist of the Heart, I didn't spend as much time. (About two semesters?) Still, I think RF has a lot of room to grow. I have a couple of scenes that I thought of later that I need to integrate into the story; a few subplots got dropped, and the world could always use fleshing out. Oh yeah, and I need to make sure the story stays consistent, as always. Since EK I has expanded about ten thousand words each time I make a revision, I'm going to cautiously assume that RF will eventually do the same. My ideal length for RF would probably be 50,000 words--which is shorter than EK I or most novels in general, but that's okay, since the scope of the story isn't that huge. (Unless I end up expanding a lot through the descriptions.)

Plan:
- Finish first draft within the week.
- Jot down notes about stuff that I already know has to be revised/added.
- Take a one-week break.
- Finish second draft by the end of June.
- Give to beta-readers; finish beta-reading process & editing by the end of the summer.
- Start work on Book Two??

Book Semi-Reviews

AKA thoughts on books that I didn't finish.

Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler

I picked this book up because (1) I'm a sucker for stories about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (hello, Darksiders!), and (2) I'm starting to research cutting and self-injury for my own project. Rage isn't a bad book; the language is poetic in a lot of places (though I feel that Kessler overused the word "kiss" for inanimate objects), and I think it does a good job of tackling its subject matter in a compassionate way. Why didn't I finish it? Because frankly I couldn't see where the plot was going. In the middle, the book lost a lot of steam, and it's not clear what Missy's specific duties as the Rider of War were. While there was an emotional arc revolving around her cutting and horrendous treatment by her high school peers, there didn't seem to be a story about the Horsemen.


I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

I'm a sucker for these types of books. I liked Jazz as a protagonist, with all his awesomeness and simultaneous insecurities, and I thought the characters and world felt real. I loved the exploration of Jazz's childhood with his dad, and the boatload of psychological problems he's left with, as well as his constant agony about whether he's a sociopath or not, and whether he's moral or acting just like a serial killer. To be honest, I'm a little puzzled as to why I felt like putting the book down. Like with Rage, I thought this novel lost a lot of steam in the middle. I think it might be because there was a lack of external conflict. While Jazz agonizes over how everyone sees him as a serial killer in the making, there's not really any indication that that's the case. In fact, I would even say most of his worrying is entirely in his own head. Moreover, I felt that the reason for why Jazz is intent on tracking down the serial killer wasn't strong, considering that he had to do a lot of semi-illegal things and got in trouble every time he tried to "help" the police. If the book showed more residents ostracizing Jazz, perhaps that would have given more of a sense of urgency to his task.

To borrow an idea I read from somewhere else (I believe from James Scott Bell's excellent Plot and Structure): I always felt that Jazz could just walk away from investigating the serial killer and nothing bad would happen to him, except maybe that the police wouldn't catch the killer (but that wouldn't really affect Jazz personally). Bizarrely enough for a murder mystery, the stakes didn't seem high enough.