Word Count Week – The Climb #949

Tuesday 28th September 2021

Word count week is going pretty well considering that today should have been a trainwreck of a day. I got a lot of work done early, which meant that when I lost a couple of hours to playing New World later in the day, I didn’t eat into my writing time.

The Accursed seemed to go well today. After yesterday felt like a pure car crash and had me questioning whether I could write, today, I feel I’m upping the stakes. I’m reminded that I’ve been told that I’m really good at writing action, and this is a major action scene with loads of POVs and lots of factions.

It’s had me wondering if this book is a little action light. I mean, there’s action in the book, but none of it seems like this. I guess that’s good. It means the story is building.

In many ways, this big action piece is when people start learning to work together. In all the action pieces I’ve written so far, our heroes haven’t worked as a team, and I guess this is the moment they do.

But I’m still making a lot of it up as I go along. I gave one of my characters a weapon, and guess what… it’s one of the few martial arts weapon I have no experience with. Why do I do this to myself?

This is a little vaguebooking but I guess if The Accursed ever finds an audience, future readers coming back to look at this blog will know what character I’m talking about. She has a history that we discover over the course of the book, and yet she’s not really a fighter until this scene. As a member of the team she’s really utility rather than a damage dealer and so she’s never really been in a position where we have to see her fight. Until now.

My idea is that during the second draft, we’re led to believe that she is afraid to fight, that she’s some sort of pacifist. And then this scene really could play well.

We’ll see. This book still has a way to go yet.

I’m honestly dreading trying to edit it as it feels such a mess currently. I guess the characters stay pretty consistent through the novel so that’s something but I have a secondary character that needs a bit of an arc thrown in, others that need their arcs building or slightly changing. It’s difficult enough to do for one character but I have probably four or five character arcs in this. Remind me why I write Epic Fantasy again?

I even went so far when I got home late tonight to sit down and write part of a future scene. One character gives a speech to another and on the walk home I came up with some good phrases. So I spent twenty minutes writing those down while wanting to go to bed, even though they have no context right now.

On the plus side, it was after midnight so that’s 400 words already in the bag for tomorrow.

I’m hoping for another big day tomorrow. I’ve got too much to do across a variety of projects not to. Word count might not be everything, but it certainly is this week.