Jason Penney's thoughts on writing, life, and other stuff
Novels I’m working on.
I can’t believe it. The first draft of the novel is done. I started writing the draft from my outline on 07/13/2004, meaning it took 340 days to get here, but it’s done.
Now I need to put it away for a bit before coming back to start the rewrite.
Phew!
Update: Final word count on the first draft was 108,840 (which was 563 pages).
You may have noticed that I got really quiet after posting almost every day. Well, I was participating in the “March Madness” writing marathon over at Forward Motion. If you’ve been keeping an eye on my progress bar at the top of the site, you may have noticed it moving quite a bit. My goal was to write 1000 words a day for 7 days, and I pulled it off! That means I pretty much doubled my daily output, and didn’t miss a single day for seven days. That’s including working about 50 hours this week, and spending 2+ hours a day cleaning the house. Phew! I hope to keep it up, but I’m giving myself a lower goal for this weekend as it’s a bit crazy.
I hope to have more detailed reviews, but in case I don’t get to
it I finished a few books since my last post. First, I finished
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Wow. It was an amazing book filled with surprises of
various kinds.
More recently I finished listening to
Ender’s Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition by Orson Scott Card. I’ve always wanted to read this,
and my friend Matt had
recommended it. When I realized that Audible had the majority of
the series available unabridged I decided to give it a try. I
really enjoyed it. I’ve read some of Card’s books on writing, but
this is the first novel of his that I’ve read. It’s the story of a
young boy being schooled in the art of warfare to fight a war
against an alien race he has only seen on propaganda films. Ender’s
story is filled with interesting and fully realized characters. I
thought I saw the ending coming, and while the events I suspected
did happen, it was not the ending at all. Great stuff!
Half way through
Ender’s Game I knew I’d want more, so I already had
Speaker for the Dead
on my iPod and started it after taking some time to
digest the ending of Game.
More soon, unless I’m busy, then more later.
I’m doing my best to do some writing on the novel every single day. I’m not going to make my original goal for finishing the first draft of the novel by the end of April, but it should be close (I hope). The back is getting better, but it still bothers me, especially when I sit at the computer for too long. I started going back to Kung-Fu class last week, which is good and bad. I got used to having more time, but I really need to go. I enjoy it immensely, and I need the exercise.
Denise and I are going through all our paperwork in an attempt to organize the filing cabinet, safe, and boxes of papers marked “Important“. A lot of them aren’t, or at least not anymore. We burned out our last shredder and bought a new one. It was cheap but I hope it’ll at least last a year.
I started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and I’m really enjoying it. Thanks to Del for mentioning it recently.
The first draft of the novel continues to grow at a snails pace. I’m almost half way done the first draft, which I intended to have finished by the end of April. If I can write 700 words a day (not too hard) without missing a single day (near impossible) I’ll make it.
Housework has been the bane of my existence this weekend. Between fighting off the cold everone else has, my back pain, and the sheer length of the ‘to do’ list I was presented with I’ve managed a big fat 0 words all weekend. I’ve been tired all weekend, and it must be my system fighting off sickness, because I’m never this tired for this long.
I’m still intending to write up the 2004 book reviews, but I need to make some more progress on the book. I’m going to get back to writing now. Gotta go!
I haven’t posted much about my novel lately. The first draft is still coming along (I finally past 25% this week). I’m still plugging along, and that’s pretty much all I
wanted to say about it for now.
I do update the word count graphic at the top of this site a few times a week, so those of you who care can always see how far along I am.
Things are slowly but surely moving along with the novel. I have 16,694 words completed in the first draft so far. I’ve been using a graph to track my progress through the outline vs my progress through my word count goal.
I thought some people might find it interesting so read more if you want to see it.
Continue reading “Novel: Progress Graph”My total word count on the novel passed 10,000 yesterday. That’s about 7%. Hopefully I can write every day this week, because we have a busy weekend coming up.
I’ve returned to writing again. I have some simple maps together. I have at least enough to get me through the first bit. I hope to flesh them out later, but for now I need to get more writing done. My word count is about 5% of my goal and I’m about 4.5% through my outline.
Work on my novel has been progressing slowly but surely. I got about 6500 words in without too much issue, but I now find myself in need of a map. I hate to take a break from the writing itself at this point, but I feel that if I don’t have a map I’ll keep floundering around the same few hundred words I’ve been stuck on today.
The real decision is to use the computer, or dig out some graph paper.
Phew! Today is the first day since I started writing that I broke 1000 words. I wrote early this morning after everyone was in bed, and I just wrote for the past hour. Hopefully I’ll write some more tonight.
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