This week, 14,000 words (getting a little monotonous, isn’t it?), and we’ve hit 83,000. I felt myself begin to lose momentum this week, partly because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to the characters, and partly because I can already tell this patch is going to need major revisions and it was hard to just press on regardless.
However, I will just press on regardless: only three weeks to go and I’ve hit my 125,000 target for the first draft (again, I’m not sure if I will reach that target; I might fall around 10-15% short). This will be the fastest first draft I’ve ever written. I’ve finished Simon’s arc, and now I will go back to the start and do Lily’s (Augusta’s sister) POV.
Originally I meant to write their scenes alternately, but I got onto such a roll with Simon that I decided to see him through. What I don’t have is a proper ending for him (cf losing momentum this week…), but I hope Lily’s arc will provide it – though they spend the bulk of the story separately, they do intersect at the end, as you would expect.
The danger of doing it this way is that writing Lily, or at least her story arc, is much less fun than writing Simon. However, because I have the structure of Simon’s story in the background, the guidance there should be enough to pull me through any tough bits. In particular, she gives me a chance to describe novel things to the reader, that Simon doesn’t bother thinking about because he’s already familiar with them.
