Word Count Summer. ✍️
A Secret Letter about how I'm making the most of my summer and writing a prison ghost story novel (with nuns).
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A Word Count Summer.
The goal this summer is words. Lots of them.
This summer, I made the ambitious goal of finishing a draft of a new novel (a prison ghost story with nuns) by August. This is my big writing focus for my sticky St. Louis summer, my companion-task for each long day until fall arrives. I set this goal in order to keep my hands busy while my first novel is on submission with publishers, a waiting game that (I’m realizing) can only be alleviated by simply writing another book. I refuse to wallow in all the email inbox silence. And, trust me, there is much silence. I’m determined to just go on.
So, I’m spending my summer writing a ghost story. I started drafting this manuscript around late February, and it’s poured out of me with a lot of jumpiness and surprise. I worked backwards with my plan for the story, knowing the ending before I sat down to write the first sentence, which was a new thing for me as a (newbie) fiction writer.
I’m about halfway in, roughly 45,000 words. This is the hardest part. The middle. I always have lots of energy and clarity in those first 30-40K words, and then I have to figure out how to inject the story with its next two acts. Once you get past that first third, you have to take the reader on an elevator ride to floors they didn’t know were on the button panel. (It’s the same with plays, I think.) First, though, you have to decide what those floors are or if they could even be described as “floors” at all. Maybe they are pools or heavens or roads or bogs.
