Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: exhausted
  • Music: Delta Rae, "Country House."

Draft status -- CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT.

Total words: 122,700.
Chapters: Thirty-one.
Pages: 412.

Reason for stopping: draft one is finished.
Music: Delta Rae.
The cats: Lilly, bed; Alice, unknown; Thomas, bed.

Did somebody get the number of that truck?

Well, there you go. Draft one is done. I have edits to process, corrections to make, structural elements to adjust, and lots and lots of trimming to do—the book is currently somewhere between five and eight thousand words longer than it needs to be, the length of a short story, if you wanted to write a short story made up mostly of "just," "that," and assorted wishy-washy modifiers. But the words are on the page to be mucked about with. The first draft is finished.

I am exhausted and I feel sort of beaten, but the draft is done. Tonight, I will drink deep from the keg of victory. BRING ME THE FINEST MUFFINS AND BAGELS IN THE LAND!

Draft!
Tags: book status, chimes at midnight, toby daye, word count
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  • 76 comments

traveller_blues

October 10 2012, 01:59:59 UTC 4 years ago

Congratulations on finishing another novel draft! I am in awe of your writing fortitude... this is no surprise. And if I could figure out a way to send bagels through the Interwebs, I would bring you a hot, oven toasted bagel with butter and a hint of garlic. *sagenod*

And before I chicken out and decide not to ask, I have a technical question... how do you decide how long a chapter is going to be?

[ ] - When the chapter says it's done to me.
[ ] - At least N words, but less than M. Some chapters are longer than others.
[ ] - At the cliffhanger. Always at the cliffhanger.
[ ] - At the logical break at the end of a scene.

Being a tech writer, I'm writing using the N > 3000, then logical break which-may-be-a-cliffhanger route in the current novel I'm playing with as a warmup for the NaNoWriMo come next month. But one of the things I always struggle with is where and when I should make a break in the action to close a chapter -- do you plan for a set wordcount per chapter, or just kinda go with the flow, damn the torpedoes?

Thanks in advance...
-Trav

seanan_mcguire

October 12 2012, 15:14:58 UTC 4 years ago

The chapter ends where the chapter ends. There's no minimum/maximum, although I try to keep things at comparable lengths. And "always a cliffhanger" is what leads me to stop reading a book a lot of the time.