Progress on my Novel: February 28

February has been an interesting month for my family. I don't really want to go into a ton of details in a public place like a blog, but I will say that three of the four of us were hit with the flu; it's been a rough month, especially the second half, and we're not all fully recovered even yet.

Despite that, I wrote throughout the month. When I had the flu, I still wrote my 1,000 words per day. Maybe it was a little obsessive to do so, but I felt I needed to get the words written every day.

Well, I didn't write 1,000 words every day. I finished Part One of the novel on February 5. Immediately after that, instead of writing, I spent almost a week revising and making major cuts to Part One. As I said last month, I realized my novel was getting too long, so I re-read all 286 pages (91,461 words), asking myself if I really needed that section of the novel, if I really needed that subplot. I then re-read Part One AGAIN, re-reading each sentence to see if there weren't a shorter way to write each (I was amazed, by the way, by the number of "that"'s I used that were entirely unnecessary. Not wrong, just not needed. 100's of them over the course of Part One. I'll highlight in red throughout this blog similar "that"'s that don't need to be there.). In the end, I cut Part One down to 253 pages and 81,699 words. I was thus able to cut about 11 percent of the novel out. I'm still a little worried, though, as I think Part One is going to be about half of the novel, and I'm really trying to keep the novel under 500 pages. Way under 500 pages. I may have to cut again.

Some of the cuts were painful; one section in particular that I decided to abandon wholesale represented more than an entire day of writing. But I watched a video somewhere early in the month wich gave me a lot of hope. It was an audio only YouTube video that included all of the songs cut out of the final version of the Tony-award winning play Hamilton. There were some 20 minutes of songs cut out of the musical, and for the most part they were really, really good. But the play overall is better without them, and like this novel, would have been way too long with them. So I actually watched that video a couple of times, telling myself it was good to be reminded that just because a piece of writing was well written didn't mean it needed to be kept.

Anyway, as of today, I have written 317 pages and 99,241 words, and if I had to guess I'd say I'm somewhere between a third of the way and halfway through Part Two. I expect by the end of March to be finished with Part Two and working somewhere in Part Three, and if that works out, I should finish the novel by the end of April, which is about what I expected when I started.

Progress on My Novel: January 31

It's become glaringly apparent to me that I will not be posting regularly to this blog. Maybe I will do so once I finish my novel, but not while I'm working on it.

Speaking of the novel, as of January 31, I have written 79,961 words of the novel, and I am on page 246. I still haven't finished Part One of the novel, though I am getting close and will most likely finish before the end of next week. However, Part One is only about half of the novel, which means I'm looking at a 500-600 page novel. Everything I've read about getting a first novel published suggests that's too long, that agents and publishers won't take a chance on publishing that large of a book with a first time writer. So I think I'm going to have to do some cutting. In the end, doing so will probably make the novel better anyway.

I had a dream last night, a recurring dream that I had quite a bit when I was teaching. In this dream, the details of which vary, I'm a classroom teacher and I'm not prepared for class. Sometimes I don't know where my classroom is. Sometimes I don't know who my students are. Sometimes I have no idea what I'm teaching. And some dreams are a combination of these things. Last night I dreamed that I was teaching, and I panicked because it was the end of January and I hadn't covered ANYTHING yet. At all. As in the students and I had done nothing since school started. Also, and I can't explain why this didn't trip alarm bells in my head to let me know that I was dreaming, but the members of the pop group Fifth Harmony were in my class. I remember starting to call on one of them, and thinking, "I don't know her name. I just know she's part of Fifth Harmony."

Oh well.

Off to write something that hopefully makes more sense than that...

Progress on my Novel: December 31

So much for restarting this blog, huh?

I didn't write anything all December. And it's not that there wasn't anything to write about. The whole family took our first trip to Chicago, which was really enjoyable. And there's been plenty of stuff happening in the news. But I just haven't taken the time to actually write in this blog. When I do sit down, I want to work on my novel, so that's what I've been doing.

And how has that been going? Fairly well. The goal I set for myself, as I mentioned last month, was to write at least 1,000 words a day six days a week. Other than the week we were in Chicago, I have managed to do just that. And progress has been steady but slow.

On November 30, the day of my last post, I had written 11,362 words (36 pages) and I was in the middle of chapter three. Today I have written 39,113 words (118 pages), and I'm in the middle of chapter seven.

And it's time to get started on word 39,114.