The Unification Chronicles

3765 words!

Day three of Cru­sade was a suc­cess. I got 2005 words, the first time I’ve crested 2k on this book. (Day 1 was 737 words, day 2 was 1023.) It’s been much, much harder build­ing up speed on this than it was on Rev­e­la­tion. The first day of Rev­e­la­tion was 3200 words, just a bit under my total word count on Cru­sade.

Part of this, I think, is fatigue. I fin­ished writ­ing a novel and plunged right into a new one. Not only did I not take a day off, I didn’t even sleep on it. I started Cru­sade the same day that I fin­ished Rev­e­la­tion. No won­der I’m tired. Frankly, this is Josh Curry’s fault. I had to jump into Cru­sade right away, lest I give him an even big­ger head start on our word war.

But also I think it’s that Cru­sade is a fuzzier story to me. I knew where Rev­e­la­tion was going, or at least I thought I did. I turned out to be wrong, and the char­ac­ters came up with won­der­fully unex­pected ways to get to the endgame of book 1, ways com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what I had in mind. But hav­ing some­thing in mind gave me the con­fi­dence to barge into the writ­ing, sure of where I was going (even if I was wrong).

With Cru­sade, as the result of the unex­pected twists in Rev­e­la­tion, I find myself in largely uncharted ter­ri­tory. I have an out­line, of sorts, and know where the first act has to end up, but how to get there is a com­plete mys­tery to me. To some writ­ers, this “thrill of the blank page” is a won­der. To me, it’s ter­ri­fy­ing. As I write, I’m find­ing out where my “sweet spot” is between plot­ting and pants­ing. Too much rigid plot­ting (what I ended up with on Ghost Ronin) and I’m too bored by the story to write, but too much pants­ing and I’m par­a­lyzed by inde­ci­sion, unsure of where I’m going. I need just enough out­line to give me a map, but not enough to tell the story for me. I think this is what I have with Cru­sade, but it’s still prob­a­bly a lit­tle too far to the pants­ing side for comfort.

The solu­tion, obvi­ously, is to do a lit­tle bit more out­lin­ing, work­ing back­wards from the act 1 break. I might do that tonight. But for the most part, I’m going to enjoy hit­ting my word count and watch me some of the TV machine. Maybe even eat some­thing tasty. And tomor­row, we’ll see if I can match what I did today.