Number Crunching

I started today at 6962 words below par at the start of the day.  That’s worse than on Monday but a little better than my 7001 yesterday. And I’m looking at a 2K day today which will be the most I’ve written in one day all month. (Now if I can just keep it up until I catch up…)

I’m doing too much telling and not enough showing (a fairly common flaw in my first drafts and I’ll fix it later) and description is sorely lacking. (I struggle with description. Fixing the tell/show thing is a lot easier than describing people and places.)

Sometimes the words are yanked kicking and screaming from my head to the screen and sometimes they flow willingly. The kicking and screaming ones are the worst parts: stilted, awkward, and definitely not happy about being forced to come to the party.

And I’m now at over 23,000 words and still haven’t introduced the second main character.

I think I’ve figured out how to fix that, though. I’m going to be cutting a lot of what I’ve written (basically anything to do with Boyin, which should cut a fair number of words) and make him the second main character. I can merge Boyin’s current back story with the back story created for the original second main character, Arthen. (And get rid of the name Arthen which I wasn’t really happy with anyhow.) I’m still not sure where or when he’ll show up now, but hopefully soon, since Zin is almost free of the Fortress.

I might also cut a lot of the stuff at the beginning, before Zin leaves his home, and put it in journal entries at the start of each chapter instead. We’ll see.

But all of that is for later. Cutting stuff from the novel is for rewrites and editing, not for first drafts. In the meantime, I’ll just cut all of those scenes mentally and once Zin meets his partner I’ll use Boyin and pretend that everything else never happened.

Meanwhile, I’m addicted to the stats page on the NaNoWriMo site. It lets me set small goals for myself as I write.

For instance:
Words Written Today = 1673 means that I just need 27 more words to hit 1700. (I told you they were small goals.)

Total Words Written = 23044 means that I need 56 more words to hit 23100.

And by then the number of words I need to hit par for the day will be low enough that I can reach the next hundred on it. (I keep a calculator open on my computer and run numbers through it every time I update my word count, which is frequently.)

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get lucky, the words will flow, and I’ll have a 3K day.