Seven pages a day

[desperance]

Pages: seven. (And lordy, there's a surprise; these mid-afternoon pub visits are a killer, ordinarily. But I was right at the end of the week, right at the end of a section: I got there, just about.)

Words: 1920

Zukotou:

129,413 / 125,000 (103.5%)

And the girl-no-longer-disguised-as-a-woman has met the Crippled Man Whose Significance We Do Not Know and the pirate-no-longer-disguised-as-a-pirate. Finally. And the lamplight flickers in the torture cell, and now can we move on? Please?

In other news: well, that worked. Fifty pages in seven days, exactly. And no, I have not finished the book, not nohow. Nobody who knows me will be surprised.

The big question is, do I carry on regardless? Do I aim for the same again, another seven-page-a-day extravaganza? It worked this week, but I had no other engagements at the week's start; I'm starting this with several. Which I might manage to work around, but... Well, I dunno. Having an absolute target helps, but only so long as I can keep to it. As soon as I have a failure day, who can say? And do I want to risk it...?

Comments

[kazdreamer.livejournal.com]

What made you decide on the 7 pages a day? That's pretty cool...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

7x7 is 49, plus one makes a round fifty for the week. Which is a lot. And I naively thought I could maybe finish the book in that much.

Alas. The book is no nearer finished than it was before, it just has fifty more pages.

[kazdreamer.livejournal.com]

That's okay. You do write Very Long Books. :)

Hmm... I like this idea of counting pages rather than words. I was aiming for 10 pages today, but have so far written 'only' 8. I might try the other 2 now.

Or I might just watch TV.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, go on. Brag at me. See me fall fainting after seven, and boast idly about your ten; and then be bloody casual about it, will I/won't I, as though it really didn't matter in the least...

Damn your long dark hair and your doubtless disingenuous eyes...

(But yup, counting pages is good. You can cheat! Twice per chapter! 'Cos the last page of a chapter obviously counts as a page despite not needing to be full, and the first page of the next chapter ditto ditto, 'cos it has to have chapter headings and chapter titles and they always start halfway down the page. It's like a double bonus every time a chapter ends...)

[kazdreamer.livejournal.com]

LOL!!! That long dark hair & disingenuous eyes part had me chuckling for real. :)

But honestly, my 8 pages were hard work. If I write more than 2k per day, that's good going these days. *sigh*

And you are so cunning! I like the page-count thing... I only recently found out about the first page of each chapter starting halfway down the page, too! My agent didn't tell me, but I noticed that everyone else does it...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

*puts on wise old hat*

There is nothing more useful in life than a convincing way to lie to yourself, esp about the amount of work you're doing.

Trouble with computer wordcounts is that they're relentless; you can't cheat the numbers. A hundred words fewer than yesterday is just that, however you try to shade it. With pagecounts, a hundred words fewer can nevertheless be a page longer! Which is more work done! See, the numbers at the bottom of the page say so - and numbers don't lie, you can't cheat the numbers, I just said so!!

So - those of us who grew up with typewriters particularly, where you do anyway measure work page by page (I did once invent a device to count words on a typewriter - it would click over one digit every time you hit the spacebar - but computers came along before I could put it into production and earn my millions, alas) - you learn all kinds of pagecount tricks. Why end a paragraph at the end of a line, when a couple more words tossed in somewhere will flip it over to the start of the next line, and take you one line closer to the end of the page? (This has a double advantage when you're cutting for the second draft: take out just a couple of words, and look, that's a whole line saved...)

And if your book divides into sections as well as chapters, then you can have a part title - PART ONE: OF CABBAGES AND KINGS - on a page by itself, and that's a whole page for free. And so on. I tell you, I have not wasted these thirty-some years at the wordface, oh no...

[kazdreamer.livejournal.com]

Wow, you really are wise! I hadn't thought of any of this, especially with the rise of wordcount meter thingies... It's all about the words, baby! But, no... I could do pages instead, especially as I love to fool myself into thinking I've done more than I have. I think this is very smart, although I guess I could do wordcount as well - like you've been doing with your 7-day push.

Also, "Of Cabbages and Kings" should definitely be used somewhere, if you haven't already. :)