The truth about blogging
Posted on | November 28, 2007 | 3 Comments
I wrote another thousand words on my new story this morning. 900 words continued where I left off yesterday and 100 words were the final paragraphs, which came to mind to me sometime yesterday. They maybe not be the absolute final paragraphs, but it’s the story kicker. The “oh shit” moment.
The first draft is going to be longer than I anticipated. I’m currently at about 2100 words, and I’m sure there will be at least another 1000 and perhaps 2000 words because I’m facing a scene that’s going to have a fair amount of description. I hope to come in under 4000 words. After editing, it’ll probably drop back to 3500, maybe even 3000.
Speaking of “oh shit” moments, there was a perfect example on The Unit last night. That dreadful, sinking feeling that you’ve just done something with enormous repercussions and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. It happens at the prison, when Tiffy realizes not only the truth of who the man is that she’s visiting, but how the information she inadvertently provided to him will come back to haunt one of her best friends very soon. Brilliant writing.
“The Geezers” (5 Stories) is a mystifying Straub story. He goes out of his way to not tell readers stuff, leaving us to piece together a jigsaw puzzle without a cover photo to work from. In the afterword he says the story is “a fascinating exercise in withholding everything that might explain what the protagonists and their friends were up to, and describing instead their reactions to the consequences of the unstated actions.” The only thing I don’t like about the story is the way he shifts from a detailed exploration of the habits of all the geezers in the first half to almost exclusively focus on a single character for the rest of the tale. It makes the story feel somewhat unbalanced.
I upgraded the YaBB software on my message board last night. Of course, I ran into a couple of glitches along the way, but I got them sorted out and didn’t lose anything. It looks pretty sharp, and supposedly has enhanced spam protection. I haven’t had any spammy posts since it went live, so that’s a hopeful sign. With the previous version I was getting hit left and right until I added some custom mods to keep people from particular domains from registering.
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About
Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, From the Borderlands and The Blue Religion. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and a member of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging community. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews.
November 28th, 2007 @ 11:01 am
i’m really in awe of how quickly you are able to crank out words. i know you are a professional author, but i never understood until taking on this nano wrimo challenge just how difficult amassing a higher word count than my longer blog posts take could really be. i’ve just crossed over to 15,000 words, and i’m practically gushing over this. i’ll not hit fifty grand by the end of this month, but it’s taught me so much. in fact, i’m going to try and pitch the small book i’ve written.
thanks again for inspiring me.
November 28th, 2007 @ 11:11 am
A lot of it boils down to mental preparation. When I know both the story and the characters very well, I can fly. I don’t worry too much about pretty or even accurate grammar, I just get the words down on the page. There’s plenty of time to fix errors and improve the prose later. Some writers do it differently, perfecting each sentence as they go, but I get too bogged down that way, and the story suffers. When I did NaNoWriMo last year, I was off on vacation at a beach house for a week and there were days when I wrote as much as 8000 words. In that case, I knew the entire arc of the story and I understood my characters’ goals very well, so it was a breeze to work each day. I didn’t have to spend too much time dithering about what came next.
People marvel over Stephen King’s prolific nature. Even if he did just 1000 words every day, that adds up to 365,000 words a year. An average novel for him, or three or four for most other people!
November 28th, 2007 @ 11:19 am
*nods* that makes sense. my book is not a fictional novel, but rather a guidebook of sorts, so plotting out the story has been… difficult. but, i’m satisfied with how it’s developing none the less. i’ve written fictional short stories before, but only as a passing flirt with time to kill, and this is so very different.