Book Series
The bulk writing, the writing just to get traction and capture the story is long done. Now it’s finesse and fleshing out and filling holes and making consistent: the hard stuff. This is going to take some time.
In the meantime, here’s an outhouse on Mars.
Word count over the past few days: 3796
image: composite using artwork by Luis Peres from the second book and an image from https://www.flickr.com/people/scottkmacleod/
Today’s word count: 288
These counts will be very bursty and uneven for a while. Some days will see entirely new sections, with high counts. Others will see glue text, as I bring pieces together and smooth the edges.
(BTW, the images I post with these updates do, in fact, have relevance to whatever I work on that day.)
image: public domain
Today’s word count: -1461
I said changing tooling at this stage would be dangerous.
But I expected this. It’s all part of the Delta-v equation for putting a story together.
That figure reflects the 2063 words removed in redundant sections and the 602 new words I wrote today.
So far, I’m digging Scrivener. Splitting and moving segments around is trivial: exactly what I need as I start bringing sections together into a coherent whole.
image: Richard F. Penn (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delta_V_Earth_Moon_Mars.png)
Scary stuff today: I am trying out Scrivener (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) for the first time.
I’ve always written my books in Word, opening a new file for every scene or thought, then pasting them all together into one document at some point when it felt right. This worked great for the first book (~5000 words), not as great but still ok for the second (~17,000 words), and will likely be terrible for this new one (currently ~21,000 words and growing). The proliferation of files and resulting loose-ends is becoming difficult to manage. Scrivener is a writing tool that is designed to help manage a large writing project. We’ll see.
Why is this scary? Well…
Today’s word count: 0
image: Chuck Dent (http://www.dentranch.com/index45.html)
Just finished a huge bout of research: reading papers and contacting professionals in an effort to make sure the story fits with known science and technology. Today is the first day I’ve actually sat down to just write since my previous update.
Today’s word count: 1154
inflatable airlock image: NASA
The atmosphere of Mars is thin, but it still transfers sound.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Program How cool is this?
With today’s entry, I have completed the primary plot arc. That sounds like a big deal, and I guess it is. But there is still soooooooo much to do. The timeline is full of inconsistencies. POV wanders willy-nilly (omniscient, but needs taming). I’m way out on a limb with some of the technological events. There is no Act 1 or denouement. Much of the storytelling is fragmented and includes notes to myself. Characters need further development…
So, a milestone of sorts, but nothing to celebrate.
Today’s word count: 952