Weekly WIP #8

Done at 100,500 words, which is what, 8.5K more? By “done” I of course mean “…with the first draft,” which means that, once I’ve given the manuscript a couple weeks to cool off, I get to do all kinds of revising and rewriting. I’m not complaining. That process is just as fun and awful as writing the first draft, but in a completely different way. I think it’s very necessary for novels, too. With a short story, you can often hold the whole concept in your head at once, translate it to the page, and find that, barring a bit of line-editing, you’ve more or less recreated that vision.

At 5000 words, give or take 2.5K, a short story is 5% as long as this book. There are going to be things I didn’t account for and need expansion, and things that felt promising as I wrote them but ended up going nowhere and need extraction. Taking care of both these things makes a book much, much stronger.

Think I’m done with progress reports for now, though, mostly because I’ve discovered they’re boring as shit. Bye!