Logistics will slow you down…

I did manage to grind one chapter out today for 2602 words. I could have hit another one save for two reasons.

First, I had to work out the last section of the book, both in terms of plotting and then logistics. Plotting was pretty easy. Going into the end of the book I have two action lines, one major, one minor, and three viewpoint characters, two for the major, one for the minor. I had to make a couple of decisions about how I want the book to end, but with that done, then I had to get down to logistics. In this case that means working out distances and time of travel. One group has to go further, but is traveling faster. The second group is going slower, but doesn’t have to go as far. I had to double-check my speeds according to human averages and historical records, and it works out that I can get both groups where I want them to be on roughly the same date. For a variety of reasons this works out really well.

The second reason I only turned out one chapter is because my hands really hurt today. I’ll probably only do one chapter tomorrow, too, then finish with a flourish on Monday. Finish November, that is. The book, it looks like, has another week or so to go after that to wrap everything up.

One of the things I have to face is a set of chapters that I hate. These are the “on the road” chapters that happen in every novel. In this case, I’ll actually skip a lot of the actual “getting there” stuff because, realistically, not much happens. In looking over some historical diaries of guys making similar trips, the notations run along the lines of, “walked five miles today. Ate the Captain’s dog.” Informative, not terribly dramatic, and might as well be handled off-screen.

Couple posts back I mentioned the spell-ahead word “thanksh*thog.” In a discussion in Second Life, I was asked what a “sh*thog” actually was. I decided that henceforth and heretofore, it shall be the male equivalent of a drama queen. The English language was lacking a good term for that phenomenon. Can’t wait for the dictionary to include the word and credit me. That’ll be about twenty years from now, but I’m hopeful.

For the rest of the day I did research. I was helped by an order of books coming in that had all manner of cool stuff in it. Because November has reminded me how much work one can turn out if you just knock off a chapter a day, I can start looking at some other projects that I kept putting off, telling myself, “After this book…” No reason to wait. Writing is a job, and if I work at it, I can do a lot more than I have been. And in this day of transition to digital publishing, I need to be turning out more material—especially stuff well suited to exploitation in the digital age.

November Word Count: Hard: 92455 Soft: 18118

Tomorrow, more words and soccer.