DENOUEMENT. . .WHATEVER THAT MEANS

I was so excited this weekend because I knew that I had only two chapters left in School Spirit and I knew what was going to happen and I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard. It was especially difficult to withstand the excitement, though, as Monday was a holiday.

Chapter 19 would be comprised of two scenes: 1) the end of the climactic car chase and 2) the main character saying good-bye for all time to his ghost girlfriend. On Tuesday I wrote scene one and today I wrote scene two. Today's writing was very sad, actually. Finally, I spell-checked and printed up chapter 19, hole-punched it, and added it to the blue notebook.

That leaves Chapter 20, also slated to be comprised of two scenes. I expect it to take two days (one scene each day--Thursday and Friday) and then I will enjoy, as I have five other times in my life, typing the words "The End."

And then my work will be roughly 35% done.

Sigh.

FOUR CHAPTERS AND COUNTING. . .

I finished typing, spell-checking, printing out, and page-numbering chapter sixteen.

I know, for a fact, that I have exactly four chapters left in the first draft.

As of the next chapter, seventeen, we are officially involved in the Big Finish.

And, since chapter sixteen makes 189 pages, I know that I will make my goal of just over 200 pages. With editing--both addition, subtractions, and general tightening--I hope to end up with a tight 200 pages to peddle to the agents.

Interestingly, a little bit of life got in the way yesterday. Some of my papers from school were piling up, and we are nearing the end of not only the grading period, but the entire school year, so I needed to take my writing time to grade and enter student work. In an unprecedented move, I took my laptop home and did about thirty minutes of work on chapter 16, effectively finishing it up so I could print it up today. I expect to get back to the keyboard before school next Monday to start the climax of School Spirit. It will be close, but I might still make my goal of finishing the first draft by the end of May.

I will be happy, of course, to finish it even a bit past that, but I'm shooting for end of May.

Wish me luck.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL. . .

Yesterday, I talked about how I didn't get much writing done--ninety-nine words to be exact. It was the first paragraph of Chapter thirteen.

Today, however, as a result of our crazy testing schedule, I got to work at the same time (6:15 a.m.), but I didn't need to stop writing until almost 8 o'clock. I wrote for over an hour and a half. In essence, I completed the rest of the scene that began with the first paragraph I created yesterday and continued on until I reached the cliffhanger that rounded out the scene. And upon reflection, for a first draft, it holds up pretty well.

word count goal: 500. final word count: 1,367.

Furthermore, just before I finished the writing session, I created a list of bullet items outlining what had to happen between now and the end of the book. A little polishing later in the morning (while my fourth period, or as I call them "my dream class," tested), and I could envision the entire end of the book more clearly than I ever had before. Once printed, I took the list of bullet items and penciled in possible chapter breaks to get a sense of the structure. And, as if by magic, they broke down into a very neat and orderly progression of scenes.

It was a thrill not only to get in the zone and produce an entire scene--that didn't completely suck--but it was also very exciting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the entire project.

Overall, a very productive and successful writing day!

SPRING BREAK AND BEYOND

Intending to get some work done on the novel, I lugged my school laptop home over our two week Spring Break. At the time, I was in the middle of Chapter 12, where Drew and his best friend Ben visit the makeshift shrine people constructed in honor of Drew's dead girlfriend. The shrine is situated at the guardrail where her car went over and into the canyon.

Even though it was a basically leisurely and relaxing Spring Break, I took the laptop out only once and cleaned up a little bit of what was already written. Consequently, I lost about two weeks of writing time.

Today is our third day back from vacation and, although I didn't write Monday in deference to preparing for teaching re-entry, I did write yesterday and today, finishing and printing chapter 12.

The manuscript is now at a respectable 138 pages.

ONE HUNDRED SEVEN PAGES

The milestone I hit this morning was to finish writing, spell check, and print out chapter nine, bringing me to a whopping 107 page manuscript so far.

The other cool thing is that about two years ago, while I was working up the preliminary material for this book, I jotted down some notes on a passage I wanted to include--snippets of dialogue and the like.

And then it sat in the background folder for two years.

But today I hit the part where those notes made sense, so I wrote them into the book--finally. That was fun because, even though I punched it up some as I wrote,
I was always sure it would be a funny section and it still seems to work.

I feel that I am still about roughly halfway through the first draft.

Not bad for just over seven weeks.

I feel just a bit ahead of schedule.

WEEK THREE

I will probably not do a status check at the end of every week--especially if I feel I am on track. But since it's still early in the process, I thought I should. As tomorrow is the end of week three, I wanted to see if I was close to the 30 page mark. Again, if I count the first four pages I wrote (which amounted to not much more than a literary throat-clearing), I have--as of today, Thursday--written the first thirty-eight pages of School Spirit.

And that's one day short of the full week and starting the week with a holiday and no writing at all.

38 pages. Nearly a full week ahead of my goal of 10 pages per day.

It may ALL be crap, but it's making a nice neat stack on the top of my file cabinet in the office.

That's the way these things start.

I may get there yet.

POINTS TO PONDER

• While I am grateful for a day off work, it is a writer's nature to feel guilty when he's not writing and, since I write exclusively at work, I was a little agitated during last Monday's Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. I tried to recognize that it was normal, though, and forgive myself.
• I finished, spellchecked, and printed Chapter Two. 25 pages and counting.
• I'm already recognizing certain structural problems with the beginning of the book, like the fact that I'm starting Chapter Three and, so far, we've still only seen two characters (Drew and Ben). That's a problem. Not insurmountable, but problematic, nonetheless. I understand that this book is more of a mood piece--in theater we used to call them chamber pieces--but that doesn't excuse it being claustrophobic in terms of character.
  
• I just finished Twilight, Stephanie Meyer's YA sensation. While I give her props for great details, an unerring understanding of the history and lives of the characters, and a killer (literally) story, in terms of the structure, I'm surprised, quite frankly, that this book was ever published. About halfway through it just takes off in a completely new direction and follows this new tangent throughout the remainder of the book (maybe I shouldn't use the word "remainder" in a blog about my novel, hmmm.). The new direction was very tense and exciting but felt unrelated to what came before, as characters and story threads were dropped or ignored. I know that there are other variables--timing, social climate, luck, ,etc. But I'm still surprised an agent found this structural schizophrenia was acceptable.
• Another area that I'm operating on a ton of faith is this: School Spirit is the most "un-outlined" book I've ever written. I have a ton of background material, including a detailed treatment (what they use for screenplays), but there are still parts of the story that to quote an old colleague "have not yet been revealed to me."
• Got some good work done today, though--1,125 words in about 45 minutes.

STATUS CHECK

Disclaimer: This post is about quantity, not quality. Let's remember that, shall we?

My goal, as you may recall, was 500 w0rds a day and/or 2 pages a day, for a total of 10 pages per week. At the end of the first week, though, I neglected to check my progress. I just didn't think of it for some reason.

But today is the end of week 2. I figured I should have written about 20 pages, and that sounds pretty good to me.

If you include--and why wouldn't you?--the four pages (double-spaced) at the beginning that I was calling a prologue (and now think of more as a warm-up, really, that I already know I won't be using), then my two week total comes to 25 pages. Even without that, we'll call it 21 pages.

Still over the goal.

Twenty-five pages in two weeks, baby.

Not too shabby.


Note: In a related issue, my daily goal has been 500 words. Today I managed a longer writing session than usual--it ended up being about fifty minutes--and when I did the word count at the end, I was pleasantly surprised.

Final count: 1,812 words. Over three times my goal.

AND WE'RE OFF. . .

Figuring that my goal was to write two pages a day, and a page of manuscript contains an average of 250 words, my word count goal was about 500 words a day.

The first two or three days I worked for the thirty or forty minutes and barely met my goal--510, 520, something like that. I was getting to know the characters and trying to shake the cobwebs out of my keyboard (from lack of use and practice), and striving to get toward the beginning of the story.

Today, though, I hit what I call the inciting moment--the moment that gets the story going--and typing started to take off.

Today's forty-minute word count? 1,075.