The 6k weekend

I’ve been working on this new story since last Wednesday, and I finished the first draft early yesterday afternoon. It ended up a lot longer than I originally envisioned. Final word count as of yesterday, pre-editing, is about 9600. I say “pre-editing” but I did edit some of the early sections of it on subsequent days, but I haven’t even reread most of this weekend’s output, which was an astonishing 6000 words.

I may have had more productive days than these, but not lately. Remains to be seen how much of it holds up and survives on edits, but I feel pretty good about the story. For once, I had a geographic destination. It was mostly a matter of getting the characters there, while portraying what happened with them along the way. I didn’t have a clear idea of what they’d find when they arrived at the destination until late yesterday morning. I took a break around 11:30 to go work out, but while I was getting changed, it all came to me and I grabbed a piece of paper and the nearest thing resembling a pen (it was a green marker of some sort) to jot some notes to myself. Once I got back, I went straight to the computer and wrote the final thousand words.

What I find especially interesting about the weekend’s work is that, at the time, I felt like I was goofing off a lot. I spent a lot of time online, and I must have played twenty games of Spider solitaire and Hearts. Thirty, maybe. As soon as I finished a game, though, I went right back to the story and wrote a bit more. I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. The live version of The Wall, the double live A Delicate Sound of Thunder, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Final Cut. They formed the soundtrack for the story, although the story opens with the main characters listening to Nine Inch Nails.

Now it’s time to tackle revisions, which isn’t as easy for a 10,000 word story as it is for a 3000 word tale. In Times Roman font, the printout is 29 pages. In Courier, it will probably be closer to 40. A lot to read critically in a single sitting. It’s a lot easier to find the continuity glitches when you read a tale all at once than if you mete it out over several days. Interesting, though, as I was driving to work this morning, I realized that I had a sort-of continuity error in a late scene. I hadn’t looked at the story since yesterday afternoon, but still it was percolating in my mind. It was an easy fix–many continuity problems can be handled in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s just a matter of making sure you don’t leave things dangling or unexplained–but it might have ruined the story if I hadn’t caught it.

People like to pounce on continuity errors made by others. They don’t realize how easy they are to create, and to overlook. The author is god in the story, creating a new universe, and it’s easy to overlook details. Like forgetting to design in bathrooms in a high rise, as the urban legend claims. It’s a matter of visualization and tidying up loose ends, and it can drive you crazy. In one of my early stories, a character who lives in an apartment later does some extensive renovations in his basement. Oops!

In the current situation, I wanted to derail my characters a little, so their engine overheated and started spewing steam, forcing them to pull over. Then a cop comes along to see what’s up. I had the characters hand-wave their way out of an awkward situation, but I realized this morning that their ploy wouldn’t work if steam was still pouring from the engine. In my mind, the steam had stopped, but I hadn’t put that down on the page, so readers might wonder at it.

That’s one reason why “first readers” are so important. They catch stuff like that quite often. God bless ’em, one and all!