Word Counts and A Thing
Not to keep harping on my woe about the length of The Soul Lies Down, but I just noticed its word count has now trundled over into the third longest thing I've ever written! The longest, to date, is The Lady of the Gift (81k) and the second longest is my novel draft from last year's NaNo (50k). Soul is currently sitting just under 42k and could easily end up double that. Well fuck.
I don't quite know why I fixate on word count so much, only that for a long time (most of my teens and twenties), I really struggled to finish anything over 10k. I would get these vivid, wonderful ideas for epic, plotty stories, only to get bogged down in moving the words around to make the sentences perfect. So I guess in that sense, for me, a big word count signifies writerly progress. Go brain! (Although of course to make it count now I have to finish the fucker).
Today, in a fit of perversity, said brain decided to start spitting out ideas like the sparks off a sparkler for that little Buffy Thing I mentioned before. I will admit now, for the record, that that story is 100% inspired by the London Grammar song Sights.
I don't know. It's not explicit, but it just hits me as a Buffy tune (or, indeed, a Slayer tune). Think I'm gonna call the story Winter Lights.
So here's something I've just pieced together from my notes...
"What are you afraid of?" Bridget asks. "I know that you are. No one comes this far north without a reason not to be somewhere else."
The way time presses on my chest, Buffy thinks. The way I wake up and it's like that. The knowledge of the day; the fact of it; and that there will be one following it, and one after that. The way he died to give me this time and now all I have is hours.
The way I feel like I need a holiday from the holiday of my life, where I party and shop and sleep with a cute guy who's good for information but probably not good, because this time instead of hatred and self-loathing I feel such a well of sadness that it threatens to swallow me whole.
"We're slayers," she says. "We don't get the luxury of being afraid."
She looks out the window onto the landscape racing by. Taking this mission was supposed to have been a break, some well needed violence to snap her out of it. She'd meant it to be that, but she probably should have known. How many breaks can one person take before coming full circle? Because here, too, there is nothing but snow and herself and the weight of time.
I don't quite know why I fixate on word count so much, only that for a long time (most of my teens and twenties), I really struggled to finish anything over 10k. I would get these vivid, wonderful ideas for epic, plotty stories, only to get bogged down in moving the words around to make the sentences perfect. So I guess in that sense, for me, a big word count signifies writerly progress. Go brain! (Although of course to make it count now I have to finish the fucker).
Today, in a fit of perversity, said brain decided to start spitting out ideas like the sparks off a sparkler for that little Buffy Thing I mentioned before. I will admit now, for the record, that that story is 100% inspired by the London Grammar song Sights.
Click to viewI don't know. It's not explicit, but it just hits me as a Buffy tune (or, indeed, a Slayer tune). Think I'm gonna call the story Winter Lights.
So here's something I've just pieced together from my notes...
"What are you afraid of?" Bridget asks. "I know that you are. No one comes this far north without a reason not to be somewhere else."
The way time presses on my chest, Buffy thinks. The way I wake up and it's like that. The knowledge of the day; the fact of it; and that there will be one following it, and one after that. The way he died to give me this time and now all I have is hours.
The way I feel like I need a holiday from the holiday of my life, where I party and shop and sleep with a cute guy who's good for information but probably not good, because this time instead of hatred and self-loathing I feel such a well of sadness that it threatens to swallow me whole.
"We're slayers," she says. "We don't get the luxury of being afraid."
She looks out the window onto the landscape racing by. Taking this mission was supposed to have been a break, some well needed violence to snap her out of it. She'd meant it to be that, but she probably should have known. How many breaks can one person take before coming full circle? Because here, too, there is nothing but snow and herself and the weight of time.