The Zone

First draft progress of And All the Stars = approx 20,000 words.

I'm not a writer with a daily word count target - that would drive me insane.  I also have a full time day job, a tendency to go through periodic computer game addiction, and reading (other people's books) is a thing which refreshes me and which I miss if I skip for too long.  Since I have a fifty minute daily commute, my best writing time is on the train in the morning, where I can put aside my distractions and settle in to write.  Theoretically my afternoon trip would be similarly useful, but since I get up at 6 am most days, and am a bit of an insomniac, often not getting to sleep till after 1 am, my afternoon trip will sometimes involve a brain-fuzzing haze and those jerk-awake moments where you've heard yourself just beginning to snore.  [I once ended up out at Liverpool thanks to not hearing myself snore.]

After dinner is usually game time, catching up on web comics, TV on in the background.  I enjoy writing, I like to write, but if I push myself to write when I'm not in the mood for it, it's going to take some of the fun away from it, and I see no particular reason to do that.  Since I've been writing the book since the beginning of January (a date I know fairly exactly because the book was inspired by a discussion on a Goodreads review), I can add up the days and a simple calculation tells me I'm averaging less than 200 words a day.  Since I'm guessing this book will be around 100,000 words, I can thus project a first draft completion date of halfway through next year!  [Meaning final draft around four months later.]

Statistics, so deceptive.

Yesterday, I wrote around 1,500 words.  Because I had found The Zone.

Sometimes the early parts of novels roar out like lightning, only to bog you down in mud.  Sometimes books are like this one, with an age spent lining up dominos, laying the ground work, not really writing while getting the characters sorted into distinct entities - and then you're off!  Words fly from your fingers, there are no stumbling blocks, the characters have become people, all keen to do their own stuff.

I doubt I'll have too many 1,500 days.  Yesterday was a chapter I'd been looking forward - it had a minor reveal, with an added bonus of blowing stuff up - and it had Noi.  Noi is a Thai-Italian apprentice chef who can talk.  Her dialogue just flows, and I'm going, "Gods, Noi, the things you say!"  There will be more complex and difficult chapters later on which will probably bog me down at 200 words a day again, but I'm still hopeful of getting this draft done by perhaps early July (at which point I'll let it sit while I revise Hunting).

And I'm having fun!