Goals and Deadlines

So, tonight I was talking with Maurice Broaddus, Ryan Stevenson, and Dave Robison on the Round Table Podcast. The episode will be out some time in October, and you’ll get to hear me pitch and hear us talk about Norris Tilney’s next adventure, which will be a full length novel. (If you haven’t discovered Norris yet, may I refer you to “The Battle of Wildspitze”, available at Amazon, BN.com, Smashwords…)

And now I have a dilemma. Because in 50 days, it’s once again time for NaNoWriMo.

And I have this Ghost Bear thing I’m working on. Oh, incidentally, now I think I have a name for it: Scion’s Oath.

Maurice (and you should totally be reading his stuff) and the guys were so kind and I got a ton of really cool interesting ideas. But he also said something about me probably needing 180,000 words to tell this story. (I was thinking 120, but…)

IF Maurice is right (and he is the pro), then it’s simple math. IF I’m going to get that bad boy hewn in rough shape by Nov 1st, I have to put down on paper… 3600 words per day. 15 pages of manuscript format.

This is doable. It seems high, but it’s definitely doable. And not a lot higher than my regular stretch goal of 3000 words in a day. No time for editing, no time for re-dos. 3600 NEW words. That’s assuming that I need / can do 180,000 words. There’s still some planning that has to go in to this. And for every day I miss, the minimum daily word count to cross that finish line and be ready for NaNoWriMo goes up.

The alternative is… I could cheat. I could spread this out over the next 80 days. Use NaNoWriMo to drag this book over the finishing line. It’s not like there’s not a precedent for that. (COUGH Night Circus COUGH). If I use the 80 days instead, that drops the daily word count to about 2,250 words a day – 9 pages of manuscript format.

OR… I could use the 50 days before NaNo to write Ghost Bear / Scion’s Oath… which won’t be as long… but…

Talking it over with My Sweet Honey, I will be shooting for 50 days on the rough draft.

Giddiyup.

EDIT – 9/12/2012: Two quick items. #1. 50 days to get a good first draft of the new Tilney book done. Just to be clear.

#2. It’s not really 50 days. Because I won’t be writing on one day per week (Six days shalt thou work and perform all thy labor, etc., etc., etc…) it’s really more like 43 days. And to make up that time, I will have to write an extra 600 words per day to make up for Sundays. So it’s not 3600 words a day. It’s really more like 4200.

This just gets better and better.