1479 words the hard way — total 60,888

I ended up having to rip out another section of the story today, so that pretty quickly, I ended up deep in negative numbers. 1010 words in the hole, in fact.

But the things I realized I needed to do yesterday kept me going as I fixed what was broken, and let me get my characters into deep trouble while getting the story OUT of trouble… and I just kept writing until I got to a good stopping place with my main character facing oncoming death, her half-sister facing the horrors from the past… and me 469 words in the blue. (As in blue bar at the top of this post.)

Actual word count therefore, is obtained by subtracting the 1010 words I removed this morning, adding 1010 NEW words to replace them… and then keeping going until I added plus 469 more.

1479 words. Hah! Better than 1250 in spite of the difficulties.

And with that, I have managed to get rid of all the words that were going in the wrong direction.

There is, of course, no guarantee that I won’t go in another wrong direction in this book. But for now, I have a brand new scene I love that solves the problem I hit yesterday, and a good, solid start on today’s scene that I will pick up tomorrow.

That counts as a good writing day.

FOR WRITERS:

The Summer Of Fiction Writing event over on HollysWritingClasses.com starts on Tuesday, June 1st. But if you’d like to play along with us, you can set up your Goal post now. The event is free, as are the MANY handouts on the Summer of Fiction site (linked above), and the complete 3-week How to Write Flash Fiction that Doesn’t Suck class which is a popular starting class for writers who currently have difficulty finishing stories.

It will be a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll join us, and get some stories written this summer. 😀

Download as PDFPrint Page