Definitely news for me on the writing front today, so here I am posting before bed.  Yesterday I managed to finish the new outline for Dark Mirror, in preparation for the total rewrite I need to do.  I put it away, as I said I would, with the best of intentions to let it sit for a while.  And, like I also said, I didn’t wait nearly as long as I had planned.  I’m fairly impressed that I managed to hold myself back for slightly over 24 hours, which is better than I did with waiting to read the first draft.  I can’t even take credit for that, though, as it was mostly courtesy of some gaming keeping me occupied.  In any case, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, was that I have read the new outline and I am still very pleased with it.  I think it’s a great deal better and reflects better choices that spring from greater thought put into those choices.  It’ll give me a good basis for a better story and better draft.

 

With that in mind, I’m about to embark on another write-a-thon.  NaNoWriMo worked well for me, so I’m going to go with that model again.  30 days, write every day, have an overall goal and daily pace, and then see how far I can go.  I’ve even made up a tracking program similar to the tool NaNo offered us.  I’m not going to bother giving it a name better than write-a-thon, because it doesn’t matter.  The goal is higher than it was with NaNo, for a couple of reasons.  First, I think we can all agree that I proved 50k words in 30 days isn’t a challenge for me.  I went so far beyond that as to nearly double it.  Also, I’m off work for 10 days between Christmas and New Years (yay vacation!) so I will have a lot of concentrated writing time, which means I need a higher goal in order to be pushing myself appropriately.  So I’m setting my 30-day goal at 75k words.  I still did a fair bit more than that for NaNo, and I think I can this time too, but I wanted to keep it reasonable and not shoot myself in the foot by over-reaching.  That will give me a daily pace number of 2500 words, which I think I can do if I remain committed and willing to push myself.  I’m still kind of in the swing of writing all the time from NaNo (I hope) and the last half of NaNo, I was hitting 2500 most days, more on plenty of days, even ones I worked on, so I think it’s reasonable.

 

I’m almost tempted  to sit down and start now, but I’d like a day or so to get my brain locked into writing mode, so I’m going to start Friday after work.  30 days from that takes me to January 15th as my finish date.  As with NaNo, I’m going to be reporting my progress back here on a regular basis.  My only real concern at this point is whether my brain is sufficiently recovered by now from NaNo, but I think it’s in good enough shape for this, and it wasn’t that broken at the end of NaNo anyway (no one was more shocked than me to find I could still formulate sentences after the book was done).  So, here goes, wish me luck.  I’m hoping my test readers will have something to comment on by maybe mid- to late-february, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.  I have to remember to do this the way I did NaNo, one day at a time.  Let the adventure and blizzard of words commence.  My supply of hot chocolate (writer’s fuel) is ready, and the Netbook is charged up.