Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: blank
  • Music: Alan Parsons Project, "Oh Life (There Must Be More)."

Word count -- ONE SALT SEA.

Words: 3,011.
Total words: 104,602.
Reason for stopping: bedtime!
Music: mostly the Counting Crows.
Lilly and Alice: glaring at me from their nest of pillows.

I feel like my word count needs a little explanation.

So when I had to throw out literally a hundred pages of this book, I didn't delete them all at once. Instead, I kept them at the back of the living manuscript, and every time I wrote X number of words, I would delete the same number from the text that was now considered "out of canon." This had two useful effects. First, it let me salvage certain things that I knew I wanted to keep, without leaving them as floating out-of-context fragments in a file somewhere. Secondly, it kept me from totally losing my shit, since suddenly going from "most of a book" to "a few chapters" is terrifying enough without your word count going back to zero.

All this is by way of explaining how I could have just written 3,000 words to wind up with a word count barely 600 words more than last night's word count. But more importantly, this is the real word count. I have finally deleted the last major chunks of the old book, leaving me with only those few scenes that I know I still need to re-incorporate. As of tonight, One Salt Sea is wholly and entirely itself, free of old identities and old ideas.

I'm both elated and terrified, because this really isn't the book I originally thought that I was writing. It's something better. It's almost the true sequel to Rosemary and Rue: it resolves a lot of the plot threads the first book left dangling, while introducing still more. It's a better book than I could have written two years ago. And it's still scary as hell.

But it's almost over. So I guess I better get used to the terror.
Tags: one salt sea, toby daye, word count
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  • 36 comments

mathnerd

October 26 2010, 12:01:51 UTC 6 years ago

Oh, yes! Finally! No more new side-plots, but a return to the true story. *licks her lips, cat-style* So, where's my button to make it March, already? Or my ARC?

PS The package arrived, my minion thanks you profusely, I will thank you once she posts the greater package and I receive it in two weeks.

seanan_mcguire

October 26 2010, 14:12:14 UTC 6 years ago

Oh, I can't promise no more side-plots, since more of them are the true story than you might realize at the time (May, for example, is far less side-plotty than people tend to assume she is).

Your icon delights me.

mathnerd

October 26 2010, 14:15:31 UTC 6 years ago

May isn't a side-plot. She never was, as far as I could tell. Toby is going to NEED her. *blinks* Who said she was a side-plot?

And I didn't mean there wouldn't be stuff to the side, I meant, no more side-plots instead of the original arc. Sorry, I wasn't fully awake yet. I had rye bread with liverwurst and am doing better now. *g*

(Isn't is awesome? It's for Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's ... Trilogy set to our favourite tune.)

seanan_mcguire

October 30 2010, 22:51:30 UTC 6 years ago

Strange numbers of people. It confuses me. May matters!