The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

I just capped the end date on the first draft for my third novel. I’m pretty happy with how it’s come out. It’s about 112k of words, and around the 90k mark I wasn’t sure if I had lost my place or not, but it feels like it ends kind of strong. I hope it does, anyway.

It took me just under three months to birth this baby, and in all it has been just over a year for me to have completed three novels. One is completely proofed, one is very well proofed, and this one only just cooled about an hour ago, give me a break, I’ll smack it on the bottom and get it breathing and applying for job soon, okay.

This one was a fun process of showing just what dedication could yield. As anyone who has to hear my wwInterweb ramblings knows, I get up early to write, it’s all I think about, blah, blah, blah. But, I did stick to a routine. I wanted 1k of words out of me every week day. Without fail, and fail I rarely did. I wrote 116k in 82 days, that’s not bad darts in anyone’s books. There were days where I didn’t write, I never forced myself into Saturdays and Sunday (though some did eventually become quite productive) and there was the odd day where I would sleep in, or just not get much done between watching YouTube clips or reading webcomics. Then there were the other days where I would nail out more than 1k of words. I’d do a k and a half, or even 2 on the good days. It all adds up, and I’ve proven that to myself.

I was consistent. I was always here on the laptop. Something was always ready to come out. But I did have some help.

When I started the novel it was my last holiday from school/work, two weeks. I managed to use that time to nail out 37k of words, if memory serves me correctly, and that was only in about half of that holiday. The story flew out of me, I was stoked.

Then over the next term, 10 weeks, 70 days, 50 weekdays, I wrote 62k of words. A pretty steady pace, I think. I felt I was staying on target for sure.

Now I am just in the first week of my next holidays. I’ve worked for the past three days and the daily details run (with very slight rounding) 4k, 4k, and a 5k to finish. Now it’s done, but you can see that my days off work so much better than the weeks where I have to run a day job as well. I can write in a whole day on holidays what would otherwise take me a week while working. I don’t want to think that I should dedicate my weekends to this sort of prodcution because you do need downtime, a bit of time to yourself, to your relationship, or to your mates. A life must be lived and I am not ready to sacrifice that, not yet. So I will take my work days, to pay the bills, and my weekends to have a bit of fun, and sometimes gather ideas/characters for other stories, but I bless these holidays. They are the money time, and not to be wasted.

Now that the story is finished I feel this weird rush of domination and completion running through my body. I know soon I will fall flat, the drug of completion giving way to that lost ocean of not having a certain book or set number of words to hit every day. It’s a sad and lonely place but I’ll stand atop my fallen prey for now and not worry about the indigestion it will cause me later. Now is the time of celebration.

I am Jack’s raging sense of entitlement and glee.

I think the novel is good, it starts in one place and moves to end somewhere completely different. It is a deconstruction of the madness of creativity and the creativity of madness. It’s right up my alley.

I had a look at the stats for the book, man I love me some stats, and they are interesting if nothing else. Look at the dates of creation, and completion. I love knowing exactly when it began, and ended. An afternoon start, a morning conclusion. The amount of times I have saved, man I hit CTRL-S after every paragraph, or every time I’m about to hit ALT-Tab and go surfing. Also the editing time is interesting, I assume that means how long the document has been open for, over 22 days. If I sat at the computer full time and wrote it would take me 22 days to write this. In theory. But, as I learnt when I was young, when a hippopotamus runs in water it is actually quite fast. Really fast in fact. So I told my brother that a hippo was really fast and he said no it wasn’t, and I said in water it was but he explained to me that on land the water would not hold its weight for it and gravity would make it so much slower. And I said, yeah, but in theory it could be really fast. My brother laughed at me, in a nice way. Theory is one of those laughable things.

So, this is the end. I’ll let it sit for a while and then I’ll read it. Maybe I’ll print it off and let the lady read it first, but no one else gets it until I’ve had at least one pass at it. Make sure there’s no school boy errors in there. And until then I have a stack of books I’d like to read, and plenty of other things to keep my mind busy. Real busy, lest my creativity devolve into madness…

Posted on September 29th, 2009 by ryan
Filed under: Writing