So again, here’s where I started:
At this point, I think I have a reasonable chance of actually finishing the book in 90,000 words rather than 110,000, so I reset my counter back to 90K, reset it again so that I was starting at zero words from the new target, and started writing.
And this time, the story stayed weird, and funny — but in the dark and dangerous way that I need for the ending of the middle book of the series.
I still have all those other words over in my Book Four Scrivener document, and while I have them in there as the first two chapters, I’ll probably end up doing a new first chapter, and bumping them down to two and three.
With all the math fiddled and fixed, I got better than my planned words for the day, have a much better focused scene that drives me toward the already written ending of this novel without sidetracking…
And after a compelling and important meeting between between my main character and the person who will become primary to her in the last two books, this chapter had an equally important meeting my main character and one of nearly equal importance.
As things that need to happen at the pivot in a middle book, I’m really pleased with how this is now working.
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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but seeing the progress bar at the top of each book post gives me a bit of happy.
I know we’ll be waiting for these books a good while yet, but watching them creep incrementally closer to published – and thus in my greedy little hands – is delightful.
That progress bar is one of the things about Scrivener that I love. It sits to the right of my document every day as I’m writing, and it allows me to just focus on the work without constantly checking to see how I’m doing. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see when it turns green (sometimes sooner than I’m ready to quit). But if it isn’t green, I’m able to just stay focused on the story.
It’s very freeing.