Yeah, I lost. I knew early that I probably was. I had too may days were I was staring at the screen wondering how I wanted to phrase something. I ended this year with 45,454 words. Okay, technically I have no idea how many words I have. There are 44.5k in my .odt and the roughly 1k words I wrote today at work. About 15k of those words were written in the last five days. Here are some more numbers for you, there are currently 63 8.5x11 typed pages, 6 7x5 hand written pages, and 16 chapters (or 15 chapters and an epilogue...not sure). While the page count will grow, the chapter count won't (or shouldn't).
There is still a lot to be done. All the chapters have now been plotted out (as of last night), but there are still four chapters to be written. I also have a lot of one liners that need to be filled out. These mostly occurred when I was stuck on how I wanted to phrase something but had the entire next scene floating around in my head. I have some sizable chunks that need to be rewritten, since I abandoned potential themes as I went (namely magic). And as I go, I should probably work on tone, voice, and add in some wanted exposition and description...all the stuff I am not good at. I am terrible about goals (as is obvious since you are reading a post about how I failed), but I would like to have all the stuff in this paragraph done before 2011...Spring at the latest.
The order of books (which I think I talked about 4 posts ago) has been redone. About halfway through the month I decided the way I had been planning was pretty dumb. Essentially, I was taking two different books and making you read chapter 1 of both, then chapter 2, etc. Yeah, lame. So, now we have shiny new story Arcs. No longer will the main character leave midway through a story to do stuff somewhere else for several months. It was weird, the Saramis side of the stories seemed to fit together better when I wasn't arbitrarily trying to pull it apart.
The Saramis Arc will most likely be three books, and starts with the book I was working on this year (and technically three years ago) for NaNoWriMo. Before last year's NaNo, I hadn't put much thought into Anne's story. As her story was fleshed out, it blew up into something huge and epic...and totally out of sync with the rest of my plans. I tried to fit it around what I was doing, but as her story kept growing, I realized it wasn't going to work. So, now, I am going to do all the major Saramis stuff back to back. I have already started collating ideas and themes for the next book.
The Druid Arc is a working catch all for anything post Saramis Arc right now. I have no idea what all is going to happen, though I have a few ideas for major themes. The novel I worked on last year for NaNo will fit in here. I have lots of shit happening to Gibson in the Saramis Arc, so last years novel will need an insane amount of editing and rewriting, but hey, it wasn't finished anyways. This will probably just sit in a directory in my Dropbox until I am finished/bored with Saramis.
Now I think it is time for another cup of tea and maybe some WoW.
