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First draft is done (making it the first novel draft I’ve finished in, what, a decade? Maybe longer?).

I’m off to vegetate to the Dresden Dolls and eat my body-weight in celebratory chocolate. Tomorrow I start work on the Claw redraft I’ve been putting off for far too long…

I’ve not been writing well for much of this week. This is understandable, given the circumstances (dying relatives, grieving, comforting the grieving, and going in search of an affordable jacket to wear to the funeral) but it’s also kinda frustrating given that I constantly open the Black Candy draft and think “so damn close – why aren’t you done yet.” Tonight was write-club though, the one thing that keeps me productive during even the worst weeks. And I had a big ol’ night of writing, pounding out about seven thousand words during the four or five hour period that almost makes up for my somewhat sluggish pace the rest of the week. To whit, a Black Candy draft update:

Part of me is feeling very pleased with myself. The other part of me is thinking “So Damn Close. Why Aren’t You Done Yet!”

Four scenes to go. And that’s probably on course for an extra 8,000 words. Then I can begin the revision process whereupon the 80,000 words will start making sense.

I recommend going over to Angela Slatter’s blog and reading this entry on Write-Club. It should provide context for how I managed to achieve this in the space of two months*:

The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that write-club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week and write. It also involves coffee, chocolate, short bursts of writer-angst, and screaming “write” at the top of your lungs whenever the other person looks like they’re slipping into dangerous levels of procrastination. The process works remarkably well, as evidenced by the fact that I may actually be capable of finishing a novel draft for the first time in about a decade. Angela Slatter (the other half of write-club) has already finished her novel draft, done a fair chunk of a novella she’s co-writing, and started the revisions on her novel. Angela has more detail. Go forth and read.

I’m quietly confident that I’ll get the novel done sometime during this week’s Write-Club on Friday, despite the fact that I know there’s some interruptions coming during the week. I really, really want to get this draft over with so I can go back and start fixing things, making stuff awesome, and generally playing with stuff now the structure is in place.

*I’m actually kinda shocked that it’s only been two months since I started the draft, but I went back and checked the Black Candy notes on the blog and the first entry shows up on April 30th. I’ve been keeping a list of things that surprised me about writing at this length (such as, say, not knowing how to structure a chapter) that I’ll probably blog once I finished the first draft.

1) More Hornspotting today, this time courtesy of a review over at Horrorscopeby Craig Bezant.

2) Apex Publishing are offering pre-orders on Descended from Darkness, the anthology that brings together a years worth of stories (including my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) from Apex Magazine.

3) Last night there was write-club, and I wrote up a storm on the Black Candy draft between chatting with Angela Slatter and exchanging texts with Jason Fischeras he had his own write-a-thon in Adelaide. Then, because my sleep patterns are horribly messed up and 1 am seems like a really appropriate time to be doing things, I came home and wrote even more. Net result was about six and a half thousand words:

Today is a little chaotic, so I give you the following post in four-point structure.

1) More Horn-spotting over on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog today, this time in the form of a Horn review.

2) My parents have currently made it from Turkey to Singapore, currently scheduled to land in Brisbane sometime tonight. Went over and saw my sister this morning, whose generally closer to my extended family than I am and pretty exhausted after spending much of the evening at the hospital. She’s not sure whether my uncle will hold on until my parents get back, but she managed to contact my mother via phone during one of his moments of lucidity last night.

3) In what may be one of the weirdest articles I’ve seen in some time, “Zimmer frame gang ‘tortures adviser’ who lost $4 million.”

4) Against all odds I managed to fight through the lethargy and waiting to get something done yesterday, even if it wasn’t quite the baseline 2k words I look for if I’m going to call a day “productive.” To whit, the current Black Candy draft stands at:

So last night, in a fit of mild insomnia, I busted out a bunch of words and managed to make Yesterday a productive day.  Then I engaged in the sport that girliejones has dubbed Horn-spotting. Then my internets went wonky, so I went back to bed. Anyway, for the record:

I’m tempted to try and hit 50k today, although given that it’s almost lunchtime and I’m yet to write anything (and the house needs cleaning prior to an inspection tomorrow) that may be a tad too ambitious.

My life seems to be settling into a comfortable word-count routine again, which is good news in terms of getting the novel draft finished but somewhat crap in terms of interesting blogging. I have noticed how much easier this whole novel-writing-thing is when you actually have a midpoint to the story – perhaps the first real tangible sign I’ve had that this whole planning thing (even in the minuscule levels of planning that I’m doing) is likely to work for me. I actually caught myself thinking “36,000 words, that’s nothing” as I looked over the notes last night. Slowly but surely the writer-brain is finally catching up with the ambition.

Today there will be writing, followed by marking, followed by Death Race if time allows. And if all that gets done before eleven o’clock tonight, there may even be a few hours spent tinkering with the Claw draft.

Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result:

‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days.

Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off and spent two hours revising Claw in which I resolved my issues with the structure of the novella’s first chapter.

I can have more days like that one, I think. It’s kinda nice to be doing stuff again.

It appears we have the first review of Horn live on the internets, courtesy of awritergoesonajourney.com.

Meanwhile I’m peeling myself off the couch after three straight days of Veronica Mars DVDs and trying to figure out how to get back to work. My current to-do list: Black Candy draft, Clawredraft, third Miriam Aster novella draft (since I now have a plot for it), short story redrafting, marking of student assignments. I suspect what I really need to do is the latter, since it’s going to have the most psychic drag associated with it, but I do so hate the marking process…

Black Candy Draft

Projected Total: 80,000
Total Words to Date: 19,345
Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour 12 Days:11,057 (although some of that was scenes I’d pre-written and stitched into this draft)
Deadline: July 23rd

As you may have deduced from the lack of updates recently, this week was full of badness – day job issues, contracts evaporating without warning, and the general financial angst of being marginally employed all combined to ensure that the most productive thing I’ve done for the last three days was pull my lazy butt of the couch and go shopping. Fortunately the ever-awesome Angela Slatter was heading around for a writing session this morning  and I wrote about two and a half new words between cooking lunch, chatting about writing, and eating chocolate.

Interestingly I’m more-or-less on-track when it comes to the plot-to-wordcount layout I had in my head that said twenty-K was the end of the first act (and it is, more or less, although I may have another scene in there). This is effectively the first time I’ve ever worked to plan this far in, but that may be a function of changing my definition of “plan” than anything else.