Friday, November 9, 2007

Building up stamina

Yesterday I wrote about my anxiety about how long the rewrite will take at this rate. The only solution is to put in more hours per day than I've been able to so far. So my big goal today was to work on it--starting on Chapter 2 today--for two hours.

I didn't achieve that. I was only able to keep my head in the game for 90 minutes. But the determination and the right frame of mind are developing, so I'm confident I'll get there. Also, I feel more every day like I'm focusing on the right things while I work. I'm recognizing the places where the story can be developed and then jumping on that. My reading eye is looking for those places instead of sentence-level corrections.

The result today was that I "got through" 13 pages, which is about twice the rate as when I started Chapter 1 last week. In theory since the chapter is 26 pages, it will only take me two days to get through it, but practically I'm sure it will be longer, since as I get closer to the climax there is more opportunity for development. At those points I stop and open up the creative spigot.

Today that happened primarily in two spots, adding up to about 650 new words total.

I think the trend so far is telling me that for about every hour of reading through and fussing with the rewrite, I stop about one time and add about 400 words to develop a scene.

OK, two hours next time. I'm going to do it. I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to work on it over the weekend, though. Friday today.

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