Sunday ROW 80 Update

My A Round of words in 80 Days update:

(The goals for the first quarter of 2014 are to write on the WIP for at least Four 10-minute writing sprints/bouts/sessions.  That makes for about 800-1200 words.  I should be doing at least twice that much, but I've got a lot of other things on my plate. (Aside from weather.) )

I decided that the goal for this four day segment is to knit together everything I've got.  I have lots of notes and ideas, and I have lots and lots and lots of bits of writing from various short writing sprints and sessions.  In some cases those are duplicates as the story evolved in new directions.

So I counted that work for the "sessions" and I exceeded my goal every day for this segment.

Turns out, that once I had it all together: I have 21k words on this thing now.  That was how long I wanted the whole story to be.  And yes, there are a lot of duplications and such in that text, but this is clearly going to be a longer book than I thought. Is it a short novel or a long novella?  I don't know yet.

One of the problems I am having in regards to length is that the story structure has a weird problem. The story is about a character who has been on the run since she was a small child, and she has a reason not to want to be found, even though she is curious about the past.  So she is carefully looking into it from afar, and we don't really get to meet the people she is avoiding until late in the book.

This makes me want to stretch out the ending -- which might be okay.  It could be a longer book. However, I don't feel like that is the story I want to tell.

I think, though, that I have found the solution:  Flashbacks.   Angela has been keeping her memories buried, but now she wants to know more, so it makes sense for her to be intentionally trying to dredge them up, as she researches her family history, etc.

Thus we can meet those characters long before she works her way into interacting with them.

I'm going to do one more day on the read through and mark up -- but I hope to make today a transitional day.  I'll be sitting down and doing a "write thru" rather than just a read through.  I'll start patching in the missing bits and turning the bits and pieces into a continuous draft.

See you in the funny papers.