Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: blank
  • Music: Hem, "We'll Meet Along the Way."

First draft stats, DEADLINE.

Current stats:

Words: 6,330.
Total words: 145,067.
Reason for stopping: The book is over, long live the book.
Music: the Deadline play list and random shuffle.
Lilly and Alice: the tan cat tree and the orange cat tree, respectively.

First draft stats:

Pages: 498
Chapters: twenty-seven, plus a coda
Started: July 26, 2008
Finished: February 20, 2010

Feed took from September 2005 to December 2007 to write—roughly twenty-seven months. Deadline took me nineteen months to write. This is a good learning curve, and hopefully means that I can write Blackout in eleven months (hey, a girl can dream, right?). These are monster-length books, especially when compared to my normal, conservative "101,000 to 112,000 words" word count volumes. But they're necessary words. These books aren't padded at all. They're the length they are because that's the length they need to be.

And it means we get to spend more time together. I really miss and mourn my books when they're finished, and yeah, draft two gets to happen now, but draft two isn't the same. Draft two is about smoothing out the continuity, fixing the pacing, and picking up any dropped threads. Book three is where I get to start making things up again.

I'm amazed and shaky and a little off-balance. I am now going to go eat ice cream and watch Cabin Fever 2 (bought for just this occasion).
Tags: deadline, freaking out, pandemic time, zombies
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  • 38 comments

satyrblade

February 21 2010, 16:08:46 UTC 7 years ago

Congratulations!

Oh, wow - now I know why my novel has been taking so long to write. I'm used to banging out huge rafts of BOOK in a month or two, and I've felt slack about spending so much time on Holy Creatures To and Fro. Thanks for putting it into perspective.

*happy dance for the You*

*hugs*

seanan_mcguire

February 21 2010, 19:26:36 UTC 7 years ago

Perspective?

Confused cat is confused.

satyrblade

February 24 2010, 22:17:44 UTC 7 years ago

It's taking you years to write your novels. I keep getting frustrated that I'm not writing them in months. When it seems like half the writers I know turn out three or four books a year (and when, at White Wolf, I did more than ten a year), it's easy to lose perspective. Thanks for giving some back to me.