The Inside is the Outside

Brief updates, since I haven't in a while.

So I left off last night at 31,700 and a bit, which certainly puts me well on the downslope (wordcount-wise, but not for plot, which is really just now picking up). The good news is that the book itself feels less broken in some ways than maybe all of my previous efforts, which I guess is the kind of progress I ought to be making.

This also steels my determination to go back to The Vasty Deep as my next big project. It's become increasingly clear that the next incarnation of that book is going to be a different and sleeker beast than the first one was; one of the good effects of the first person/present tense style I'm using in Black Feathers Fallen is that it corrects in some measure for my tendency to wax poetical in the narration. With greater immediacy comes less sense that I'm telling a story, I think, and I'm less tempted to fall back on tweeness to get the point across. Maybe because there's someting about the delivery that feels less, I dunno, artificial in the first place. Hmm. We'll see how it goes as it goes on.

Shifting the gaze upwards from the navel: I should point out, for those of you who haven't already seen, that Patrick's been making much better documentation of his progress (for NaSoAlMo) this month than I have, on his new blog; and that Andy's been writing again, after too long away, and seems to have catapulted himself right into unlikely celebrity.

Tomorrow night we're off to WV for our first Thanksgiving at home in five years, which may even end up being worth the nine or ten hours in the car it's going to take to get there. Me, I'll be sucked up into The Novel for most of the long weekend, but I've promised to surface from time to time for food and socialization. Still, I'm hoping for Many Words to be coming my way in the next few days, and maybe that way I'll have a chance to update again before Slachtmaand is over. Because if there's one thing the world needs more of, it's pretentious amateur writers dissecting their processes right where everyone can see.