Day Forty - 76,202 words and counting

I'm writing a novel. All my progress can be found on my private blog. The commentary for each day's work can be found below.

Today is my fortieth straight day of writing... well, if I ignore the two forced absences I had in October. (And since I still had new material to post on those days, I feel perfectly inclined to ignore them, so there, ha.) It's as if I gave up laziness for Lent or something.

I used to wonder how authors could manage to put out two or three books a year, and now I'm starting to understand. Let's pretend I didn't have a day job. I could easily double my daily output. Let's call it a target of 3,000 words to make a round number.

Your traditional big chunky fantasy novels are on average about 300,000 words. (They could be as little as 150,000 or as much as 600,000, but I'll just say 300,000 is a good middle range.) If I did nothing other than write first drafts, I could crank out three of them a year and have 65 days left over. If I spent a few hours in the afternoons to edit, and filled up the other 65 days with revisions as well (plus a holiday or two, what the hell), that's a solid three finished novels per annum. So that must be how Stephen King does it.

There are a lot of assumptions in those calculations--first, that the revisions won't take that long. I have no such illusions about my own writing. Indeed, I would expect the revisions to take as long if not longer than the first draft. To use a painting metaphor, the first draft is when you block out all the colors, but the fine detail work comes later on. An experienced author can probably work more of that detail into the first draft, but for a newbie such as myself, it would be arrogance to assume I could do the same.

By the way, this is not really my first novel. Back in 8th grade I wrote one called Space and Beyond, which I very nearly finished. I never counted the words, but it was over a hundred handwritten pages, which isn't bad for a thirteen-year-old.

Then in high school I wrote my first completed novel, The Happy Wars Saga. (I was an experimental youth.) The word count was just over 70,000, 222 pages. I broke those records just the other day with this novel.

My writing petered out in college, but in graduate school I restarted it with Floorcraft, which began as a series of short stories. I finished five of a planned eight, and made a good start on the sixth. The first five run to 46,013 words total, and the sixth was already up to 5,000 plus. It's not finished, but I hope that some day it will be.

I'm not even going to count Dairhenien's Library, which never got past chapter 1 in any of its incarnations. Remember when I said that my writing petered out in college? Well, most of my writing time during those years was spent developing Dairhenien's Library, even though I never made a start on writing it. I plan to change that at some point in the not-too-distant future.

So for all intents and purposes, Bryony's Market is my fourth novel, and will be the second I've completed (assuming I complete it). In a way, that's a bit of a relief. You know what they always say about first novels, how they get shoved into a drawer and never published, how it's a good place to get all of the mistakes out of the way before working on future projects. But you see, I really like this story, and I think it has a good chance of (eventually) getting published. It's much easier to motivate myself to write it if I know that it's not the literary equivalent of clearing my throat before doing something else.

My last word on this subject (for today) is this--I sincerely hope that this novel is not the best I will ever accomplish. I would be perfectly happy for Bryony's Market to be considered a decent first novel, if inferior to my later works. Yes, that would be just fine.

But before I can manage that, I should probably, you know, finish this one. And that means another 1,689 words today. And since I'm picking up with Bryony, it might not be a bad idea to go back and check out what last happened in her world.

So we left off at the coolness that set in between her and Devan. Of course Devan doesn't realize that Bryony wasn't really upset with him. He's feeling hurt because he was just trying to help, and she shut him down. And Bryony's upset because when she did offer to let him help, he shut her down. Ah, miscommunication. What would we do without you to drive our plots?

Now, I know what's going to really drive the next scene, but I need to get there cleverly. So what do I need to cover before Bryony gets snatched away for her testing? I'd like to end the chapter on that, if possible. And after that, things are going to start getting pretty intense for the rest of Part 1, so I need to tie up any loose ends now, before I start.

(Kind of like in Final Fantasy VIII, how you have to go around and complete all the optional quests before time gets compressed? Yeah, I'm a geek.)

Once again, I've got some exposition to get through. How about handling it through a game? I'm just picturing the four of them sitting around a table playing cards or something like that to pass the time. Yeah, that's a good idea, because it's something I can establish as a pattern later on, a reason for them all to get together.

Okay, if I'm going to invent a game, I need to put in a little bit of creativity here. What sort of deck is it played on? Our typical 52/54 card deck is really a simplification of the 78 card tarot deck, which is a lot more interesting, so it could be played off of something like that. Tarock is the Germanic version of the name, so I could adapt it off of that.

Oooh, the Joker or Fool is also called the Excuse. Good name.

Now, cards are usually based off of the nobility. So instead of the Major Arcana (the trump cards), I'll call it the Imperial Court. Emperor, Empress, Son-and-Heir, Daughter-Imperatrix, Magician Rex, Lord High Vigor, Lord High Treasurer, and so on.

For the suits, I would use the four historical duchies. Each has a coat of arms, of course. Lions... (tigers, bears, oh my?). Lions, shields, swords, coins, serpents, staves, suns, moons... man, this is sounding like a box of Lucky Charms. I don't have to worry so much about making the suits easily symbolized, since the written language is logographic. (Like Chinese, if you're wondering... pictures to represent a word, or such like.)

Let's do swords, shields, coins and staves. You've got the court cards, of which there are twenty-one. In each suit, there are fourteen cards. Duke, duchess, wizard, and knight are the minor court, and the numbered cards are called the suit middling. The ace can trump the king or count as a one, depending on how it is played. When the ace is reduced from high to low, it is "set middling."

14 times 4 plus 21 gives us 77. But, you say, there should be 78 cards in the Tarot! Well, we're forgetting the Fool. I'm going to call that card the Low Man. He's a figure in a black mask. I'm going to base the game on French tarot. The more I look at it, the more interesting it looks to be to play. I'll have to learn it at some point.

But I'm getting distracted from the point, though, which is to have some action going while the exposition takes place. So what exposition? I need to mention Lillian one more time, hit on Kalocia, then account for Keoly and Sili at the dance. Okay, I've been here for an hour without writing a single word of narrative. Time to really begin.

--

The chapter is running long. I cut the scene off at a less than perfect place, but the chapter will finish up tomorrow, and I'll start onto 20. Oh, things are really moving now. You can't see it, but I'm rubbing my hands together and cackling.

Not sure how far I'll get tomorrow, but there ought to be some big reveals over the next couple of days. Hope you enjoy them!

Today's Total: 1,782 / 1,689 words (105.5%)
Nov. Progress to Date: 16,975 / 15,201 words (111.7%, 1.1 days ahead)
Nov. Total Progress: 16,975 / 50,670 (33.5%)
Est. Completion: 76,202 / 250,000 words (30.5%, 103 days to go)