Dealing with the optometrist ate a huge chunk of the early afternoon, but I must say, staring at the screen is much easier with fresh minted lenses. It’s the difference between eye twitches forcing me off five minutes of every two hours, and putting in a five-hour session.<\/p>\n
As I approach the 90,000 word mark, one thought is clear: the last miles are far, far easier than the first. In April, I had roughly 30,000 words and a hunch. My bet was, the back end of the story would largely write itself. And it has, with a few exceptions. I had no empirical basis for this observation, no baseline. Since the first 30,000 words took nearly six months, a window of eighteen to twenty-one months from start to completion appeared reasonable. The hunch panned out, and the blame for the long ramp up laid entirely with the beginning.<\/p>\n
Because the first fifty pages are so critical \u00e2\u20ac\u201c often writers never get past that point when an agent considers their work, and some never even get that far — I took enormous pains to get them in the pocket the first time round. After the frustration with the other book, and the endless drafts, I couldn’t face the task of writing for a year or more, only to return to discover a steaming pile had replaced what seemed like the good stuff. Straight up, Doctor, it didn’t look that bad when I touched it last. In a way, that’s true, the text didn’t look so awful. It just read like a train wreck.<\/p>\n
As long as there’s electricity, this manuscript will be done on Sunday. I have some feedback and a list of to fix items I compiled along the way, but the second week of November it’s off to the pre-submit readers. <\/p>\n
I have to say there is a certain sadness that hangs over the writing sessions as of late. Most of the time, I’m buzzing as if on a full out gin binge. Then reality beckons from the corners like a lesson you don’t want to forget, but never want to remember.<\/p>\n
This book will die for me soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dealing with the optometrist ate a huge chunk of the early afternoon, but I must say, staring at the screen is much easier with fresh minted lenses. It’s the difference between eye twitches forcing me off five minutes of every two hours, and putting in a five-hour session. As I approach the 90,000 word mark, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}