It's all gone to pieces, and God alone knows why...

[desperance]

...except that it hasn't, and I too know exactly why.

For yes, this is Tot-Up Tuesday, noon as near as; and the numbers are horrible this week, and yet it hasn't really been a bad week workwise, despite all the social stuff and then the antisocial stuff and the Unutterable Gloom and so forth.

So, the numbers: the new book has progressed to

12,919 / 150,000 (8.6%)

or in my preferred page-count metric:

41 / 450 (9.1%)

which gives me only 5,806 words for the week, 17 pages, which would be appalling. Happily, I do know that secretly it's more than that, because much of the previous week's count had to be torn apart and utterly rewritten, so you can probably add another dozen pages, another four thousand words or so to this. And, of course, I have been proofreading for much of the week; and I have also been out almost every evening, and getting upset about stuff that I won't talk about here, and so forth. So it hasn't really been as slow a week as it pretends.

Still, long way to go before I have anything I can usefully show to agents. And I am aweary of proofs already, with a whole lot more to come; and I have to write a story for the Phantoms gigs, in four weeks now. And it's cold, and I'm depressed. Meh.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you need to shift your thinking about this project to qualitative rather than quantitative terms for the moment. Are they 41 good, solid, interesting pages? Have you found the right 12,919 words to carry the story forward? With the tearing apart and rewriting, it sounds as if that's where your focus was, so don't let the numbers get you down.

Yeah, you are right; the quantity stuff is really only significant when there are commissions and contracts and deadlines and such. At this stage, preparing something that will hopefully make editors go "Whoo, yeah, gotta have this," of course it's the quality that matters. Getting it right. Hence, as you say, the tearing apart &c. It's just, I've been so bullwhipped by wordcounts the last six months or so - and so bullish in response - it feels like a failure to hand in a low week's work, whatever else has been going on. Pfui.

Also, *hugs* and nonspecific comforting thoughts for the upsetness and Unutterable Gloom.

Thank you. People are nice, y'know?