Writing in Public, Too: Day 2 – More Ashes

A good day today.
Got up at 9am again. Last day off before the work week. Got up in a good mood, checked email – and saw a bunch of comments on yesterday\’s blog posts, which made the morning even brighter. Loved hearing from folks – thank you all. I may not reply to each and every comment made in the weeks ahead, but I\’ll try to do so for as many as possible.
The morning was email, some replies on LinkedIn, and about a thousand words for a new scene in Ashes. Worked with the kids on their homeschooling off and on, and helped fix one of our twin girl\’s laptop – it was shutting off every few minutes. Just needed a reboot, as it turned out. It\’s my old machine, and starting to go, but it\’s a good machine for a seven year old.
After making everyone lunch, it was back to work. And here, I guess I need to explain this story a little.
I\’m working on \”Ashes Ascendant\” – the sequel novel to \”By Darkness Revealed\”. Originally though, Ashes was going to be a short story, since I am planning a mix of short stories and short novels about the main character, Ryan Blackwell. Then I realized it was a little longer than a short ought to be. But not quite long enough to be a novel. I didn\’t want to introduce novellas into the mix, as I thought it would be confusing to readers. So I was in a bind – a story too short and too long for the series I was working. I set it aside for a long time, and worked on other things.
I\’ve since come up with some great additional material, and a solid character arc that takes Ryan through the story. Really, I know the arc more than anything else. I know what Ryan is going to learn in this story – the feel, the flavor. I don\’t know precisely how it\’s going to end, although I have rough \”beats\” lined up for a chunk of the story. The ending is a bit of a mystery still, which ought to be fun.
But I\’ve got a lot of new material I\’ve been writing, alongside a bunch of old material from my first run at the novel. Today, I hit the old material. Some of it I kept. Some of it I tossed out. Some of it, I tossed out the actual text but kept the scene, rewriting the scenes from scratch. Even the stuff I kept needed some tweaks to bring it in line with the rest of the story.
For the record, I hate this sort of work, which is why I put it off. I was half tempted to toss out EVERYTHING I had already written and just redo the entire thing, but there\’s some good stuff in there and I didn\’t feel like I would do it better on a second run.
So, this afternoon between about 1pm and 5pm, I trashed about 2500 words, tweaked about 4000 words and put them in the right place in the story, and wrote 1900 new words. I\’m not counting the tweaked words toward my word count, but getting that stuff done was a big step forward for this story. I have another 2300 words to go over, and then it\’s clear sailing – I\’m in new territory at that point, and writing fresh story.
At 6pm, we had company come over for an ice cream party – some friends of the kids, and their parents. My wife and I talked with them for close to two hours while the kids played. It was a good time, and a great way to slow down after a busy day. Then upstairs to watch a couple of episodes of \”Lost Girl\” via Netflix with my wife. It\’s an interesting show – and watching urban fantasy while writing it works for my creative headspace.
It\’s about 11pm now, and I\’m just finishing this blog post before heading to bed. Have to be at work tomorrow for 7am. Not looking forward to the early morning, but then I\’ve never been an early morning person.
Tomorrow is another day, and we\’ll see how well I can continue to do with wordcount over the next four days, when I\’m working 7am-3pm.
 
Totals for Day 2
Daily Fiction Wordcount: 2900 words    Month to date fiction: 6000 words
Daily Blog Post Wordcount: 735 words    Month to date blog posts: 2175 words