Endgame, Two Moves Shy of Mate

[dr_pretentious]

Topped three thousand words today.

That kicks ass, even by Nanowrimo standards.

I am going to finish this draft tomorrow. Being this close to finished, and yet not quite finished, always turns me into The Scary Crazy Lady. You know, the one who's mumbling to herself in the produce aisle. That's me, trying to get the dialogue right for my little paper nonexistent people.

The closer I am to finished, the more the spongy parts of the draft seem to suck. There's nothing for it but to speed past done, send copies to the beta readers who have demanded them, and get to work on something else before I'm overcome with remorse over my imperfections.

But, hey, three thousand words in a day.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Well, the draft for a shorter project than the Nano book. It's about 22K today, which is a little long for a novella. I think it'll be done at about 25K, complete with beginning, middle, end, causal links between events, characters actually doing thing, characters deciding things, sex, and violence. There's plenty of other stuff in there that can get cut on the first pass of revisions--sometimes it's hard for me to tell whether I'm looking at a grace note or a digression.

I'm just pleased to have anything that's on the verge of being complete in all its parts, even if it is weighed down by my usual excesses.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

The Scary Crazy Lady. You know, the one who's mumbling to herself in the produce aisle.

Some of us don't have this good of an excuse. We are just the The Scary Crazy Lady. So don't feel so bad. :)

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

Then there are those of us that are cranking out another 3,000 words today simply because we didn't like the 3,000 words that used to be there. Net zero. But, I moved another chapter closer to the end as well. My beta reader has given me almost as many pages of notes as the novel is long so far. Third draft is just around the corner. If you bump into a Scary Crazy Man mumbling to himself in the produce aisle, you'll know who!

[dragonlaire.livejournal.com]

Why are you using beta readers? Wouldn't you be better off using people that can actually read instead of using release candidates? Yes, I am kidding. I intend to resist to my dying breath the tendency to reduce human units to software versions.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is an inelegant expression, and I resisted for a while, too. But then, I live with a software engineer, so it was harder for me to fight off the meme. Lots of the terms of his trade have stuck to completely unrelated household tasks, ways of planning our social calendar, etc. Since I accidentally turned him into a hardcore poetry fan, it all balances out.

Orson Scott Card refers to his first-pass revision readers as his "wise readers", and I tried that, but it implied the existence of unwise readers. Are the future readers I imagine, who may someday pay actual money to read my work, going to be less wise than the readers who happen already to be in my social circle?

Mildly amusing aside:
A while back, vgnwtch pointed me to an interview with Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's British, and the interviewer was American--the interviewer transcribed Gaiman's pronunciation of "beta" as "beater", with the result that people wrote in to ask what a beater reader was.