Someone remind me next time I'm writing a first draft to outline as I go. No, not outline <>i>ahead (that just makes sure I don't write what I think I will) just write up a chapter-by-chapter blurb. *sigh* I'm up to chapter 30, I believe, out of what is currently 51 chapters. Next stop, novel inventory, writing giant Xs on my shrunken manuscript & putting all the notes I currently have on my manuscript on my iPhone into my printed manuscript.

After that, character jounaling until I figure out how my world actually works.

Then rewriting the end of act one, the opening of act two and the finale.

Then beta call (though 3 people I trust not to totally laugh at the craptasticness have it now). I'm thinking 2-3 months, but we'll see.

Ah, revising. The fun part. o_O

Apparently I have finished a draft of Darlington! I wasn't entirely sure I was going to-- and I'm not thrilled with the ending I wrote-- but I now have the three essentials for revision: a beginning, a middle and an end.

For those who are interested, the stats:

- There are 51 chapters, ranging from 4-14 pages.

- My spreadsheet says I have 424 pages total, though my on-page numbers go up to 417 (rewriting chapter 1 multiple times is mostly the cause of this discrepancy)

- My spreadsheet also tells me that there are 111,135 words in this draft. I am an over-writer, so I knew this would be hefty going in. However, for me, that's light for a first draft, so... yay?

- There are at least three chapters I left intentionally short because I know I will be fixing them in the next draft with more... stuff. Good stuff. Promise. (Yeah, no real words left for description, sorry!)

- There are 4 versions of chapter 1.

- There are 3 versions of chapter 24

- There are 2 versions of chapters 18, 19, 23 & 31

- I still have not written the kissing scene in chapter 43 like I told Jess I would. Oops.

- I began this book on December 9, 2010. That is 418 days from initial idea to end of draft one. If this seems long to you, during that same time I also revised (meaning tore the sh*t out of) ACCURSED. Twice. (See This Post for last year's writing stats.)

And now I must shove all of it into a file and send it to my bestie before she kills me for making her wait for it :)

AND this means that tomorrow I get to work on Nat's story on the bus! Yay!

Writing (drafting) & revising are two totally different things.

Yeah, you'd think I'd have known that before now, since I spent most of last year slashing and hacking at ACCURSED, rewriting scenes, upping character motivations, going through sentence by sentence to try and make every word exactly what I wanted (BTW-- that task? Not really possible & I'm sure I failed it a number of times. But 'letting go' is a post for another time).

So when I finally got back to working on DARLINGTON I thought I'd learned SO much. I thought I was going to just pick it up, run to The End and then BAM! I'd be back in revisions.

Heh. *twitch* Right. Not so much.

See, while revising I can indulge my totally insane detail-oriented self, but when drafting-- even when drafting a story where I know exactly where I want it to go-- I can't do that. Agonizing over each sentence just leaves me with three sentences & a sense of dread at the end of the day.

Yesterday someone linked to this piece on Twitter and this line in particular really resonated with me:

If you edit your thoughts before you get them down on paper - or onto your computer - you'll squeeze the life out of your message. You may even choke it off completely.

I've finally come to admit that I will never be someone who can edit as they go. Now, I don't think the above sentence applies to everyone, since everyone writes differently and I know a lot of great writers who do think before they type.

But I'm not one of them.

My problem getting this draft of DARLINGTON down wasn't that I didn't know where the story was going (mostly, I have for months). My problem wasn't that there wasn't enough action, that I don't know the character motivations well enough, anything else I went to & tried to "figure out." My problem was that I wasn't just letting myself make mistakes. I didn't want to write yet another manuscript that took me nearly a year to revise into submission-shape. But I'd forgotten that before that whole "revising" step came the "get the hell to the end" step.

And to get there, I have to allow myself to make mistakes.

Now, I could get into the myriad of reasons as to why I was holding too tightly to the reins of the story, but that's a long (& kind-of personal) post for another day. Let's just say for now, I've let them go. This means the writing is actually happening. It also means I've forgotten half of what I said & now need to re-read the last six chapters or so to figure out the next step.

Frustrating? Yes. But better than staring at the screen, dragging out one word a minute and feeling totally worthless.

Today is Epiphany. I hadn't thought about that when I kept putting off writing my "New Year" post, but it seems fitting.

For the last couple weeks I've had resolutions on my mind. I knew I hadn't written as much in 2011 as I did in 2010. I knew the word count goals I tend to have were going to have to change. I knew my thinking about goals in general had to change.

One thing that's been hard for me to really wrap my mind around is the fact that 2011 wasn't the year I had wanted it to be. It really, really wasn't. Barely being able to type most of February into March sucked. Trying to learn to use voice recognition software (to write fiction) was disastrous. I had thought I'd begin querying in the spring. If by spring I'd meant late fall, well, then yes, I did that. I'd thought a lot of things about 2011 that just plain didn't happen.

No, 2011 was not the year I had wanted it to be. But it was the year I needed it to be. And that... that has been a hard thing to admit. I needed those months. I needed to learn more about what it meant to really dig in and revise a piece. I needed to learn what it meant to not be able to just spit out 1000-2000 words a day easy-peasy; my speed, while a good thing in many respects, was holding me back in terms of quality and truly thinking about what I wanted my stories to be.

Did I make mistakes last year? Yes. Am I still upset I didn't get more work done? Honestly, yes. I'm not even posting my yearly word count because 1) I'm unhappy with it and 2) I don't have all the data yet (due to hand-writing a bunch at the end of 2011 & not yet typing it up). And the final reason: I can't just play the numbers game.

I will still keep my word count records. I'm a stat nerd, I love having that kind of data to dig into when I want a fix ;-) But I can't let the numbers be my only guide. They're a signpost of what I'm getting accomplished, but the goal is not to simply spit out as many words as I can in a year.

The goal is to write something publishable.

So. My goal for 2012?

Write good stories. Edit good stories into even better ones. Do the absolute best work I can possibly do with my current skill set, and push that skill set-- not to the breaking point, but to the point where I'm being challenged.

I can't run myself into the ground anymore, but neither can I let things sit in the name of "not killing myself." I can rationalize all sorts of things into that category, and when I stopped to think about what I wanted to do more of this year, only one thing really came to mind.

Write.

Writing is what makes me happy. Not writing does not make me happy. I'm not going to force a word count goal, but neither will I allow a couple hundred words a day to suffice when I know-- I know-- I can do better. I can do more. Some days, yeah, I'll write 11 words (my lowest daily count last year-- editing my first 500 words of ACCURSED for SCBWI conference). But I want to get myself back in "fighting shape."

To that end, I'm taking a page from my CP's book. Jess does "touchstone words" for the year. Her post about her words for 2012, CREATE and CELEBRATE, is here. My words are a bit different: BELIEVE and STRONGER. Last year was a lot of loss of belief and, while I gained writing strengths, a loss of confidence in my strengths. I don't want to get lost in those places again.

Finally, my laptop wallpaper right now is this one from Smashing Magazine. The quote is "Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending." Do with that what you will.

Here's to 2012 & the start of something good.

ETA: To ease Ms. Spotswood's concerns, I also resolve to continue taking care of myself & not write myself to death. ;-)