I’m just casually out here at 80,000 words for The Wedding in exactly a month of writing it. Who knew, I could manage that kind of feat!
My initial word count goal of 86,000 is almost certainly too low, though. I am NOT finishing this book in 6,000 words’ time. At a minimum, I have seven chapters left to write, but it’s probably going to be eight. The smallest chapter so far is chapter one at 2,308 words and the longest is chapter nine at 5,715 words.
It’s been an interesting process, with The Album, I had a general idea of what I wanted to write and how I wanted to tell the story but there was no pressure for how to get it done. Because I’m now committed to this idea of releasing each book on the associated band member’s birthday, there’s a time crunch involved. I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all the chapters, their word counts, and how long till I’m projected to finish writing the book. Something that I never did with The Album.
It took awhile at the beginning to be okay with this not being perfect. I have to remember that not every word I write will be perfectly canon and things can change, and almost certainly will through the editing process. I’ve already changed one character’s name (after getting approval from a friend to rename the character after him).
I’m really happy with the story I’m telling. One of the reviews I’ve got for The Album said that they “felt like this author has a lot to say” and it turns out they’re right. Sometime around the middle of the book, I realised that it’s kind of becoming a social commentary on perception vs. reality. How you can see things happen, garner some aspect of the truth from it but still draw entirely the wrong conclusion.
Hopefully, other people will like it. It’s…a lot heavier than The Album, I think. I’ve stopped sending it chapter by chapter to people (barring my mum) because I feel like it can’t be read that way at this point. You need to have the option of reading more to understand what’s happened and what will happen. You don’t have that option when it’s all still sitting in my head!
On a positive note, even though I have seven or eight chapters left to write, we’re definitely on the home stretch, now. I’m getting through about a chapter every day to two days. So it’s definitely looking good for being finished by the end of March.
One thing I will mention is that I love chapter names. I think long and hard about them, I really hope that somebody, anybody, can get even a tiny bit of joy out of them. A couple of them are…obscure, to say the least, but for the ones who do get it, I knew I liked you! Hopefully, anybody that doesn’t understand them will just go “so that’s this chapter’s title, whatever” and keep reading.
Anyway, it’s 2:20 am here in Perth, so I should probably get some sleep. I’m hoping to get a decent chunk of writing done tomorrow. Maybe even hit my initial 86,000 word goal which will be an achievement, to say the least, but is an ambitious goal because I only wrote 4,312 words today!
