Let’s Write a Book! | Part VIII: Life
Word count so far: 74,013
Completed chapters: 46
Now is the time for a belated update on my book. The good news is that it is progressing, we now have about 75,000 words on the page.
This thing is an actual book.
There are characters. They talk. Go to places and do stuff, they have conflicts with each other and opinions about life and things of this nature. So far this is very positive and conducive to something somebody might conceivably read.
I personally think what I have scribbled on the page is pretty fun and compelling, but will the audience?
That is the issue.
But.
It’s a book!
My job right now is to finish the book, ignoring the voice in my head that wants to revise or doubts the quality of the work.
Later on I will try to make it into something that you will want to read.
When I first got the idea to write a novel, I had the rough goal of a year in mind, that would bring us to around 1st March 2026. This deadline has long since passed. This is fine. I have no hard deadlines and it’s more important to learn how to write a book than hitting an arbitrary deadline.
In terms of the rough plot I would say that we are in the beginning of Act 3 or maybe the tail-end of Act 2. It turns out that my middle and Act 2 section was much larger than I originally anticipated.
My original thinking was that I would struggle to stretch this book to the ~120,000 word guideline for a short-ish book. I will comfortably exceed it but I can’t see it going much beyond this.
This will be more on the Of Mice and Men side rather than War and Peace.
I’ve been slacking with the updates because I was progressing so well with the book, I’ve been banging out chapters on a weekly basis. I would plan them during the week and then during the weekend write them.
I had some minor life things that I needed to focus my time on so I wasn’t able to adhere to this schedule in the last couple of months but I’ve still managed to churn some things out. I wrote chapter 46 today, I named it after the Beach House song, The Bells.
I am sipping a small whisky on a Saturday night and I’ll do some brainstorming about the next couple of chapters. I am at the point of my plot threads and brainstorms where I can see the end and I need to think about how to wrap everything up neatly. Worry about making it neat later.
I am going to keep progressing slowly, and blogging when I am feeling in a good space, I’m not sure when I’ll next get a chance, but I should be in the trenches for the rest of the year.
If I can have the first draft wrapped up by the end of the year I’ll be happy with that and I can leave it to gather dust and start redrafting at some point.
We’ll see how realistic that is.
Today I wrote well after a long layoff and I feel like I have extra words in me so you’re getting a nice update on things. From experience I know that I will have days where I write absolute dogshit to hit my goal and want to CTRL+ALT+DEL myself.
Today is a good day, so we celebrate with a nice blog post.
Thanks for reading.
Remember – life is short and we’ll all be dead soon, so enjoy your life.
The journey so far:
Let’s Write a Book! | Part I: Optimism
Let’s Write a Book! | Part II: Planning
Let’s Write a Book! | Part III: Action
Let’s Write a Book! | Part IV: Inspiration
Let’s Write a Book! | Part V: Middles
Let’s Write a Book! | Part VI: Motivation
Let’s Write a Book! | Part VII: Act 2
