Fiction Progress

I'm writing again. That shouldn't be such an accomplishment, but life, other creative commitments (of the more poetic and musical variety) and then writer's block conspired against me for a while. So I re-read the entire thing to date in the hopes that would get me back in the mindset. And it worked! I finished off a partial chapter. I'm splitting another into two and expanding the halves.

I've now passed 60,000 words where I'd been stuck a bit about 50,000 for the past 6 months.

For the curious, it needs to be around 100,000 to be novel sized. Whether it will be "done" at 100,000 is another matter entirely. I've known for a while now that, by the "shape" of the story, this will either be a rather massive novel or it will be two volumes. I think I know where the breaking point could reasonably be in the story. But I may not get there until around 120,000 wds or more at this rate. I'll just have to see.

In the plotter vs. pantser debate (do you plot everything out or fly by the seat of your pants?) I definitely land more among the pantsers, though I've done more than usual plotting on this book. But even so, I view my outlines more like guidelines. If I spend too much time going "how on earth am I going to get that character over there?!" then perhaps the character wasn't meant to go "over there" after all.

On a funny note, I've found my weak spot when it comes to research for fiction. The topic I was researching for the book last week made me squirm more than anything else I can think of, more than my research on poisons and what they would do to people, more than burial rituals--even the creepy ones. What was I researching? Varieties of mosquitoes, midges, and other biting insects in cold wet climates. Yeeick. I really could have done without the inevitable close-up pictures of mosquitoe-with-proboscis-in-skin. Blech. Now I'm all paranoid and twitchy though mostly we've had flies this season rather than mosquitoes. Touch wood.