Quarantine Project Day 40
Well that's it for the other one, as they say. The forty day project is up, and I can report a total word-count just shy of 70,000 words.
It's not a complete first-draft because the resolution isn't there yet, and the resolution to a novel or a story is the single most important piece in the jigsaw, which is why so many "literary" novels don't have a resolution. However, the resolution, though it isn't written yet, is well-formed in my mind. There are some plot points to work out yet, but plot points are so much less important than the resolution. Plot is variable; resolution, as my Latin friends tell me, is the sine qua non.
The truth is that I would never anyway have any idea about how long or short a first draft might be; but one thing of which I am certain is that the writing of this blog has encouraged me to produce my rough draft - my first draft - in a much shorter period of time than would have happened ordinarily.
The real work will begin after the completion of this first draft. Draft 2 will be when I bring in the heavy earth-moving equipment so that I can shift scenes around, delete chapters, fill-in new ones and smooth out those major inconsistencies caused by re-routing as I went along. Subsequent drafts will then employ more sensitive equipment until the final draft will be all about sentence-by-sentence polishing.
To those of you who have stuck with this blog - I appreciate it! It has helped to know that some of you have followed it faithfully. Plus I seem to have picked up the blog habit, so I might well continue the blog, widening it to include other things, such as my hatred of the casting of a child as the new Dr Who and other rabid prejudices. But I will also report on the progress of this novel, (maybe reporting it as Quarantine Project + 1 etc).
But not for a couple of days because I'm off to
(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")
