21-Day Novel Challenge: Day 10

And the grand total at the end of the day: 45, 062 words! It was a long battle, but I got in 6025 words to finish another day on target.

My biggest frustration right now, really, is that the story just isn\’t as long as I was planning it to be. I\’m very much below the 70k target. Going to struggle toward 60k, I think. I\’ve added several scenes to the end, but I\’m solidly into Act Three already.

Accord of Honor was 67k words, so what happened with this one?

I think part of the reason it\’s running short is because I was using a new plotting system. Remember that I mentioned I was trying out a modified form of the \”Story Grid\” plotting system? It calls for 15 segments. Roughly doubled, because this story has two POVs and two interwoven storylines, that\’s 30 major movements or scenes in the story. And I\’ve doubled up some of them, especially for Thomas\’s  POV. He\’s the protagonist, and he gets a lot more screen time.

But that\’s left me with only forty chapters in all, since I equated those major movements to chapters in my head (more or less – as I said, I made some of them two chapters). And my chapters are only running about 1500 words or so, average. Thus 60k words instead of 70k.

Lesson learned. If I want it to be a little longer, next time I need to add a few extra movements, or break up a few more scenes into multiple chapters. Open things up a little bit more. Still, the overall experience has been good. It certainly made plotting a breeze.

It also might be a side effect of writing so darned many novellas. I\’ve written several recently – all about 20k word urban fantasies. And right before that I was writing the third Blackwell novel (another urban fantasy), which ended at 48k. Typical length book, for that series.

But for my SF, I\’m intentionally trying to go just a little bit longer in the word count. It appears I still have some work to do in that regard. Every book is part of the process of improving as a writer. Identifying what you want to work on next and then plowing away at it is part of the fun.

As always, you can sign up for email updates on my progress – click the link below to join and follow along. Would love to hear comments, either here or in emails, too!

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