andphi's Journal: Novelpost: Real Progress and forecast

I have now written, I think, some 107 thousand words. I stopped taking an actual, line by line count the first or second writing day of this month. I know where the 100k mark is and that each leaf of notebook contains about a thousand words. The good news is that now, at last, on handwritten page 250, the climax and falling action are now fully set up (or at least planned and foreshadowed).

Now that the end is in sight, I am faced with the following dilemma, which I suppose I began to embrace months ago when I began to alternate writing with planning future work and indexing past output: how will I break this work, which I wrote as a single, basically uninterrupted unit, into chapters? Will I use the obvious markers - action occurring in disparate locations - for the macro-chapters? I think, perhaps, I will. Breaking the macro-chapters done by event or theme might require more judgement and discretion.

Additionally, I begin to wonder which parts will have to be fleshed out, which trimmed down, and which completely moved around. I suspect, for example, that I will need to lengthen the early sections because I was most negligent of description. I also suspect that certain fight scenes will need to be re-written entirely. I accept that. This is a first draft. I am prepared for at least some of my readers to detest it. To state the case more emphatically, I am an unknown writer of unknown skill. I am (at least in theory) aware that everyone may find my work at best uninteresting, even my lovely wife, and at worse horrid and not to be pursued.