A wee progress report

So after a recommendation I decided to do Jacqui Lofthouse’s 30 day writing dooberry. I’ve already managed to miss a few days and as for the gratitude diary... well least said about that the better. On the whole I am taking and leaving things as I choose while sticking to the basic premise of knocking out about 1,000 words a day and writing for an hour a day. So far so good, I reached day eight with just under 10,000 words, but I knew that there was some serious editing needed already and I wondered when that would take place. Ah, day nine. The word count for today was meant to be 500 and I was supposed to take one small passage I was unhappy with and edit. So I printed out all twenty-nine pages and by the time I could go no further on page 17 I had already scored out a whole eight pages. Aah! Without even doing the re-writes and just chopping my word count was down to 7,200.

Ok, but it’s not the end of the world and the ten reasons why (I’m supposed to do this everyday, not exactly like this, but what the hey).

1. I got into the mother’s head, so even though I cut all her first person bits out, I now know where she is coming from.
2. One of the characters went from about twenty-five to seventeen in the space of a few pages, and even though this story is just a little bit weird, that’s too weird.
3. The first chapter, opening sequence whatever is now much better, maybe a little challenging for a reader, but I prefer it.
4. Even though I will probably edit all this again, the story really started to come alive for me around page 19, so I do need to edit so that the story leads to that point and then I’ll probably have to edit all again.
5. There are bits that are chopped out that can come in again later, so it’s not all wasted effort.
6. Ehm this is getting difficult... I know my main character a bit better. I remember the first time I created him I wanted him to be a right little shit, but despite that I really liked him. Well, the thing is that I was probably that right little shit and I’m a bit older and wiser now and so I think that I can create a better little shit with some hindsight involved.
7. I’ve now got a visual image of my characters, before they were just impressions, so movement and mannerisms are easy to deal with now as well.
8. I sort of kind of already knew that I was able to chop things out of my work, but I usually like the OK of a reader, so I’ve gone ahead and done this alone.
9. La la la lah ... blooming heck, ten is quite a lot really. Oh I’m well into the writing, I do think to myself, even though I’ve got to find movers and do this and do that, I also must do my hour even if it is 11.30 when I start.
10. How am I going to keep this up when I’m holiday for a month? Long hand? Ye gads! Is it possible?

And some more progress. Well, I added a word count bar so that I can keep tabs on myself. Did a mammoth job yesterday until about 2 am. Then came back and rewrote that until about 3ish and I’ve had another jab today, so I’ve caught up on the word count. I’m just thinking though that 30,000 words is about the point where I usually think everything is crap and stop! Ooks I hope Lofthouse has something for getting you through the next 30,000.