![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wordcount 12/24
Dec. 24th, 2021 10:53 pmNovel #4: 47k / 60k
Happy Christmas Eve!
The funny thing about being a slow writer who averages writing 1 book every 2 years is that I literally forget what the drafting process is like and have to learn all over again with each new book. And said learning process feels like getting repeatedly punched in the face.
I'd forgotten there always comes a time when I have to stop obsessing over rewriting previous scenes and just power through until I can produce a dirty draft. And yes, this draft is going to be dirty. I don't know if I've ever had to rewrite a story as much as I will have to rewrite this one, because it's a murder mystery and I keep changing my mind about scenes and realizing the investigation can be better or more interesting or less clichéd and gahhhhh.
(Also, so many of my revisions/revision plans are me asking myself "This was so obvious, why didn't you think of this immediately when you first started drafting?" and my only response being "...............")
On the bright side, my first draft is clearly going to pass 50k words. Will it reach 60k? I don't know, but I'll aim for that. Novel #3 reached 60k words for the "first" draft and eventually expanded to 70k after several rounds of editing, and 70k words sounds like a good amount for a fantasy mystery. (Although I honestly don't really know what are expected wordcounts for any genre anymore, because I feel like everything has just been getting longer and longer. Hell, even contemporary romances are 100k words now, which boggles my mind.)
Happy Christmas Eve!
The funny thing about being a slow writer who averages writing 1 book every 2 years is that I literally forget what the drafting process is like and have to learn all over again with each new book. And said learning process feels like getting repeatedly punched in the face.
I'd forgotten there always comes a time when I have to stop obsessing over rewriting previous scenes and just power through until I can produce a dirty draft. And yes, this draft is going to be dirty. I don't know if I've ever had to rewrite a story as much as I will have to rewrite this one, because it's a murder mystery and I keep changing my mind about scenes and realizing the investigation can be better or more interesting or less clichéd and gahhhhh.
(Also, so many of my revisions/revision plans are me asking myself "This was so obvious, why didn't you think of this immediately when you first started drafting?" and my only response being "...............")
On the bright side, my first draft is clearly going to pass 50k words. Will it reach 60k? I don't know, but I'll aim for that. Novel #3 reached 60k words for the "first" draft and eventually expanded to 70k after several rounds of editing, and 70k words sounds like a good amount for a fantasy mystery. (Although I honestly don't really know what are expected wordcounts for any genre anymore, because I feel like everything has just been getting longer and longer. Hell, even contemporary romances are 100k words now, which boggles my mind.)
