I need a drink!
50,036 words.
I honestly didn't think I'd finish, to the point that I set an unofficial goal of 35K words so that I wouldn't feel like a total waste of life. The goal wasn't to write something worthwhile, though. For me, the goal was to write, and write, and write some more, hopefully at a good enough clip that I'd stop thinking so damn much about how I was writing and just let it happen. That, I hoped, would let me find my voice. Because that's been the problem with me for so damned long. I don't write the way I speak (I'm always conscious of grammatical rules and things like sentence structure when I write, but I disregard all that crap when I talk), and I think because of that, I've never really written anything that seems to flow. This is always worst when it comes to writing several characters' points of view; far too often, multiple characters end up sounding the same, all of them sounding like a formal version of me. No one would want to read that (including me).
So now I'll let the words sit for a bit and then go back over them later to see what I've created. I don't think I found my voice yet, but there were a few times, when I wasn't bogged down by chunks of exposition, where at least one of my characters (my de facto protagonist) seemed to take on a life of his own. So I think this was a worthwhile exercise, if nothing else.
And of course, at 50K words, I'm not close to being done. Hell, I'm really only getting started. So if this ever were to grow into a "real" novel, I would probably have to reduce these 50K words to about 20K, and then really get the action going from here on out. That way maybe the end product would come in at under 200K words.
I honestly didn't think I'd finish, to the point that I set an unofficial goal of 35K words so that I wouldn't feel like a total waste of life. The goal wasn't to write something worthwhile, though. For me, the goal was to write, and write, and write some more, hopefully at a good enough clip that I'd stop thinking so damn much about how I was writing and just let it happen. That, I hoped, would let me find my voice. Because that's been the problem with me for so damned long. I don't write the way I speak (I'm always conscious of grammatical rules and things like sentence structure when I write, but I disregard all that crap when I talk), and I think because of that, I've never really written anything that seems to flow. This is always worst when it comes to writing several characters' points of view; far too often, multiple characters end up sounding the same, all of them sounding like a formal version of me. No one would want to read that (including me).
So now I'll let the words sit for a bit and then go back over them later to see what I've created. I don't think I found my voice yet, but there were a few times, when I wasn't bogged down by chunks of exposition, where at least one of my characters (my de facto protagonist) seemed to take on a life of his own. So I think this was a worthwhile exercise, if nothing else.
And of course, at 50K words, I'm not close to being done. Hell, I'm really only getting started. So if this ever were to grow into a "real" novel, I would probably have to reduce these 50K words to about 20K, and then really get the action going from here on out. That way maybe the end product would come in at under 200K words.