Deep Mist Day Eight

One week down, three to go. Honestly I didn’t think I’d make it this far.

Which is a good point of discussion at this stage: the biggest thing I’m hoping to get from this experience is a simple sense of what novel writing is like. Despite my substantial experience as a writer, almost everything I’ve done up until now has been short form, nothing longer than a novella (which I suspect is a short word either for “overblown short story” or for “novel that I ran out of steam on”).

My first curiosity was about what it would be like to work on something that on the one hand couldn’t be written over the course of a day or two but on the other hand couldn’t be stretched out for months and months. Of course technically writing a novel can in fact be stretched across months or even years. The first book I ever read on the subject was called The Weekend Novelist, an instruction manual on how to perform the task using only time off on the weekends.

However, I like the Novel Writing Month idea of pushing to get it done in 30 days. A longer schedule builds in too much space for “oh, I’ve got plenty of time, so I’ll watch old episodes of Lost now and work on the novel later.”

The big thing I’m learning at this point (other than the mere possibility of doing it at all, which as I said was something of a shock) is that I have a poor idea of how long stories are. In my current situation, I figured that the novel should finish up at around 50,000 words (because hey, that’s where the web site set the finish line). I also calculated that the first big section of Deep Mist (the part set aboard a U-boat) would likely be no more than 30 percent of the total length.

However, the first section (the only one I’ve done any writing on so far) is currently sitting at 15,477 words. Though I can’t pinpoint exactly where I am (as I said, story length is turning out to be a trip), I’m fairly sure of two things: I’m past the halfway point in this part of the tale, but it’s also far from over. Even ballparking it at a final of 20,000 still makes it a whopping 40 percent of the 50k total.

So does that mean the other big section (the one set in Laos) will turn out to be shorter? Or will it run the 35,000 or so I projected? Or will it turn out to be much longer than originally planned, just as the first part did? And if it’s much, much longer, how much beyond November 30 will I have to work in order to finish it up?

As the saying goes, only time will tell.

By the way, 2325 words for today (might have gone longer if I hadn’t stopped for an unusually long nap in the middle of the afternoon). That’s an average of 1935 words per day, currently 2145 words above the required pace. The web site projects that at this pace I’ll hit the goal on November 26, which is the day before Thanksgiving.