So it would appear that my pace faltered a little this week. I was only able to tack an additional 9,281 words onto “Mourning Dove,” bringing the grand total to 37,566 words. I’m actually not that disappointed in those numbers. That meant that, over the past week, I’ve averaged 1,325 words a day. Except, come to think of it, I did even better than that. Technically, I took Sunday off so I could write a whole bunch of blog posts and thus didn’t have time to hit my goal of 1,500 a day. As a matter of fact, if you take Sunday out of the equation, that meant that I’ve been averaging 1,546 words a day, slightly over my target.
Okay, I’ll stop patting myself on the back now.
Overall, I’m still behind in terms of where the story needs to be. While I’m aiming at 100,000 words total for this book, I’m thinking I might need to crank out somewhere around 125,000 in the first draft just to get through it all. I’m still struggling with how to layer in some backstory elements (and there are a lot that needs to be there for the story to hang together). But overall, I’m still feeling good about this project and how it’s coming together.
So if you’re interested in keeping up with how I’m doing beyond just these weekly posts, there are two ways you can do that. For starters, you can follow the progress bar on the right side of the screen. I always drop my daily progress into that bad boy and it’s been fun to watch the little line creep up the scale.
But this month, there’s a bonus way to do it. An author named Bethany A. Jennings started something on Twitter called #WIPJoy, which is a way for authors to share details on what their current work-in-progress is about. A lot of people have been sharing info on their books, and I decided to join in the fun.
In case you missed it (or aren’t on Twitter), here’s what I’ve shared about this project so far:
#WIPJoy Day 1 – “A young actor impersonates a lost princess to save her kingdom from a tyrant.” Sort of a riff on the Anastasia story.
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 2, 2016
#WIPJoy Day 2 – Current status of project = first draft, about 30k words in. Big ol’ mess right now
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 2, 2016
#WIPJoy Day 3 – Describe my WIP with five *verbs*? Um… twisting, deceiving, revealing, unmasking, and… acting. 😛
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 3, 2016
#WIPjoy Day 4 – What emotions does your setting evoke? pic.twitter.com/kIhsxiYbmK
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 4, 2016
#WIPJoy | Day 5 “Share a line with a detail about your protagonist’s past.” How about a page or so? #overachiever pic.twitter.com/cbyR53KwlO
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 5, 2016
#WIPJoy Day 6 | What does my antagonist love? Mine loves himself: his power, his life, but he secretly crushes on his BFF’s girl.
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 6, 2016
I’m cheating at #WIPJoy again. Sorry! pic.twitter.com/NBq4LvHM2F
— John Otte (@JohnWOtte) September 7, 2016
So there we have it. Next week, hopefully I’ll be able to report some big numbers. And I’ll probably include a #WIPJoy update as well. But if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling the need to play a videogame or something before trudging off to bed.