M. B. Weston’s Writing Diary: 01/13/15

The first fourth of the very rough draft of my urban-fantasy pulp novella is done! I got a good hour-and -a-half of writing in last night and got to my inciting incident! It’s two days later than I wanted to finish but it’s done. (Now I gotta start threatening the muse with a good throttle if I don’t get some new ideas for the next fourth.)

Bear in mind that I use the words “first draft” and “rough draft” loosely. I use brackets to show things I need to add in later, and I actually do things like this:

[they both exchange several punches until Michael got the upper hand]

I just covered a full page of pulp battle with a bracketed sentence. Yes it’s cheating, but I like to get the skeleton of the story complete before I go back in and add the details lest my entire plot change and I eliminate the scene.

If anyone missed my “rough draft math,” here is a quick explanation. My rough drafts tend to be about two-thirds the length of my final drafts. My inciting incident should take place one-fourth of the way in. This novella is supposed to be 30,000 words, so that’s a little over 7,000 words per fourth. Since my rough drafts are two-thirds shorter than my finals, I need around 5,000 per fourth.

My inciting incident hit around word 4,500, but I will wait until everything gets fleshed out before I work on timing and pacing and such. Seriously, it I’m going to sum up a full page of fighting with “[they both exchange several punches until Michael got the upper hand],” I had better plan to be flexible.

Anyway, I reached a waypoint last night, and I’m quite excited. Although my writing sessions haven’t always been what I wanted them to be, I honestly believe writing every day in 2015 is going to change my writing career, and I recommend it to everyone!

Toodles!