982 words. A little better than yesterday- I’m allowing some things to happen, and if I have to speed up this bit of the story, then so be it. I don’t know what I’m going to end up with, but it’s going to be interesting finding out.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

12,790 / 67,500 (18.0%)

805 words. To be honest, it’s not helping that at the moment, I’m not quite sure how to graduate my story from the world of normality into the world of strangeness- the way I’ve got it thought out, it needs to be a gradual thing… but I think plunging into weirdness unexpectedly might be more exciting. I’m slowly learning the difference between writing down every single beat of the story and only writing down the ones that actually make a significant difference (I’m not writing highbrow literature- most of my stuff is designed to be a funky, strange adventure). Most of the stuff I’ve written over the past couple of days has been useful to a degree, but it hasn’t actually been stuff I could see lasting into the next draft. I don’t want to stop and take a break- I just need to choose which of the multitude of forks in the road in front of me I’m going to actually take.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

11,808 / 67,500 (17.0%)

Soon, I may have a blog entry that isn’t just a progress report. Stranger things have been known to happen…

The trees outside are covered in snow. I’ve just done today’s quota- 921 words. Wasn’t quite as easy as yesterday- I’m still wandering through unknown territory story wise, and it’s probably the kind of thing I’ll only be able to correct once I come back and redraft.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

11,003 / 67,500 (15.0%)

1102 words. All before breakfast.

And the running total is… (drumroll)…

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

10,082 / 67,500 (14.0%)

I have cracked the 10,000 word mark on this thing. Life feels good!

1127 words. This, on a scene that I wasn’t even sure I could do.

I’ve just managed to get my two lead characters to meet properly (admittedly by accident). It might be cliched and contrived having them running into each other (it’s set at a school, and they don’t share classes, so I don’t have many options), but it’ll do for the moment. I’ll be alright once I get past the initial stages of this story- I just need to get the real bits of the story working, so that once I hit the weirdness, I can go deeply, deeply strange…

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

8,977 / 67,500 (12.0%)

1120 words. The world may be getting me down, but I’m keeping the wordcount going.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

7,850 / 67,500 (10.0%)

I’ve cracked 10%. Progress is good…

925 words. Not bad for a Sunday morning. I’m advancing forward slowly, and making a few interesting discoveries as I go. It’s all shambolic first draft stuff… but there’s some stuff I like here.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

6,730 / 67,500 (9.0%)

Briefly gave myself a heart attack when the percentage on the wordcount came up as zero- and then realised I’d added an extra zero to the total. There’s a bit of a difference between 67,500 words and 675,000 words…

1016 words. And all before 11am. I’m definitely a morning writer.

Progress on FLIPSIDE:

5,805 / 67,500 (8.0%)

On top of this, I managed, yesterday, to crack a problematic scene in The Hypernova Gambit that I’d been struggling with for ages. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s feeling like it’s actually starting to work. I had to basically strip it down to its essentials- instead of getting distracted with lots of surface details, just looking at what the sequence is doing, and get rid of anything else that isn’t absolutely necessary for that. I may not have finished the rewrite, but I’m a little bit closer to the end.

Hooray!