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Cirque de la Nuit – A WiP in Stats

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I’m nearly (really very nearly) done with Cirque de la Nuit and I’ve been pushing myself these last couple of weeks to meet the target of publishing in August (yes I know there are only a few days left, but they still count!)

Someone just said about me finishing it up and “there’s just two more chapters to go” as if that takes a couple of hours to run off and be done with – and it made me respond by dragging up the stats to the current draft to quote just how long it takes to write a book, as I don’t think I’ll be finished today somehow!

So – not that I’m using this as a distraction from continuing Chapter 19 or anything – I thought it would be interesting to pull up all the drafts to date (I’m on version 5 currently) and see what has happened along the way.

Version 1 – started 3rd November 2015

35,006 words   Chapters 1-4   94 pages   3340 minutes

Version 2

63,636 words   Chapters 5-9   137 pages   2025 minutes

Version 3

85,373 words   Chapters ?   244 pages   4277 minutes

Version 4

103,100 words   Chapters ?   304 pages   6068 minutes

via GIPHY

So… I’m currently working through Version 5, which will likely become ‘CdlN – FINAL’ in my drafts folder before formatting for the various platforms to release. At present, it has taken just shy of four years to go from the first one-shot pieces that formed key scenes in this story to a finished book. And a total of 15,710 minutes of writing (up until today) or 261 hours of writing. It doesn’t feel like that much in some ways when you see it tabled up like that, but it sure feels like it as you go along, and especially when a lot of the time you only get a couple of hours here and there to write.

What about everyone else – do you know how long it really takes you to write a book? 🙂 Would love to hear how it is for others!

Mel x

 

 

 

 

 

The Halfway Point

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don't look back This is good advice at this point in time. I’m still fighting the urge to mess around with the structure of the novel and questioning if some of the things really need to be in there – most of the time I’m winning, but I definitely feel the temptation once I’ve got a lot of a book written to keep going back over things.

So, halfway through the month, with fifteen days of writing under my belt, I feel OK. But, there’s two weeks left to go and these are usually the tougher ones for me…just typing in itself can get quite grating over the course of the month with NaNo – especially if you use a computer for much of your ‘day job’ outside the hours that NaNo takes over. I’m hoping that my interest in the story will keep me going, and the fact that doing this is getting me closer to completion in a couple of weeks, than I’ve gotten all year.

(By the way – word count this morning was 32,899 and I’m going to get some more done tonight – hopefully!)

Day 11 – No editing!

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first draftAnyone else struggle with the urge to go back and start editing / checking something you’ve recently written? When I open the document to begin writing again, I find that I have a tendancy to go back a few pages or so, re-reading to get myself into the flow…but then I find that I begin tweaking and changing and twiddling things whilst I’m there!

If you read any of the advice on the NaNo website, they advocate writing, writing and more writing -Editing is the enemy! 🙂 And I know that’s true, because my writing certainly flows differently if I’m not at all in the editing mode.

So, that is why today’s inspirational kick in the booty is this: “First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.” Now, all I have to do is actually listen the advice I’m giving myself.

 

Week One – Done!

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Too many ideas It was about this time last year in NaNoWriMo world, that I had a bit of a crisis, stopped writing anything and basically sat on the fence umming and ahhing about what I was actually going to write.

This year – because I’m working on a familiar story, that’s been in the works for a L-O-N-G time – I’ve thankfully dodged this bullet, for week one at least! Progress wise, I’ve been doing pretty well – nearly 15k words for the first week, which is a great start, but I also have to remind myself that I am deadline queen, which means that I tend to ease off, thinking I have lots of time to do nice interesting things….then have a mad panic when I realise I’ve tried to squeeze in a little too much.

So today, I’m carrying on – hopefully a few good, undisturbed hours in the library will help move me along and set me up for next week, when I know I won’t have as much time to dedicate to writing. But, in the meantime….

but first, tea (ssshhhh, don’t tell anyone!)