Writing Update: 17/05/24 (Patreon)

Start of week: 0

End of week: 8,355

Change: +5,461

Year to date: 83, 054

... though I'm hoping to hack out a couple hundred more words today.

Obviously, those numbers don't make a lot of sense. Allow me to explain. At the end of last week, or the start of this one, I decided to draw a line under chapter 2 and start chapter 3, carrying "The Story of Julia" over to the new chapter. That explains the start number of 0, and how the end point can be over 7k but there's only an increase of 5. For the next few weeks I'll be tracking the word count for the current chapter.

There were also a few tweaks elsewhere, minor revisions before posting chapter one of Book 3 to FM.

More significantly--and I can't believe I didn't notice this previously!--with the year to date passing 80k, we've long ago passed the year total of 65k for 2023. I'm feeling pretty good about that. My current approach to writing isn't the most exciting but it's proving fairly resilient. Few sudden bursts of ecstatic writing, but rather a slow but steady trundle towards the finish line. I'm more turtle than rabbit, I guess, and I've finally come to terms with that.

Chapter 3 is at that stage where it's all a bit wobbly, a bit of struggle to push through, figuring out were the story wants to go. As usual, I know the start and end point but the road there is often a bit surprising. Writing the erotic scene was easy; the events before and afterwards, especially the emotional dimension, less so.

I enjoyed a minor breakthrough though on Thursday, in which story elements I'd wanted to include but couldn't figure out how to squeeze in, suddenly found their place. A bit more sci-fi worldbuilding incoming, tied to Julia and her job.

Meanwhile, I always find it difficult to strike the correct balance between showing and telling in these bridging scenes in a chapter that drags the timeline forward. It's so easy to get bogged down in the minutae of Cindy's everyday existence, from lavish descriptions of clothes to mundane encounters at the office desk. But at some point the story's got to move forward, right?

Or as David puts it in the chapter: "That was Cindy’s first life across the month of October, largely unchanged, the whole messed-up, single-white young female reality of it flashing by in a kaleidoscope of days and nights counting down to a six-month deadline. And that life was dull, surprising, simple, amazing, fun, exhausting—in other words, a normal life—and in each day of that life there were moments of intimacy, frustration, joy and peace. To tell the story of each of those days would take forever, and looking back there is a sense of wonder that the stories of those days are my story, my life, a second youth refracted through female lens." 

Have a great weekend.