Writing Report March 12, 2022
I managed to crest 40K words in my current WIP on February 28, so I took that as a win.
February tossed up a lot of interruptions to my writing schedule, and on several days I went without writing anything intended for publication or posting (I almost always do research and write notes every day, but only count the days I’m actually working on a story or post in my word count).
Getting past the 40K mark felt like a nice psychological boost, and I’ve been able to get more writing done on the WIP during the first week of march than in the middle of February so I’m confident I should have the first draft finished by end of April.
Right now I’m projecting the first draft to fall in the 80-88K range which means after rewriting / editing / polishing I hope to hit the 75-80K mark for the final draft.
As noted before, I’m writing loose and shaggy in this first draft, with a lot of repetitive info and redundant dialog. The important thing now is to get the body of the story laid out; attaching the skin and ironing out the wrinkles can come later.
. . .
While I didn’t do as much work on my WIP as I’d hoped in February, I did write a new short story and several blog posts you’ll be seeing in weeks to come. It also struck me that a play I’ve been working on -- originally a one act play that I realized needed an act two back in December -- now needs a third act to really bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, so between the end of this WIP and the start of my next big project in July, I plan to get that act written.
. . .
The following is pretty specific to my current WIP but since it addresses a specific writing problem in a specific genre (though there may be other genres where it’s applicable), I thought I’d share my solution with anyone who might be able to benefit from it.
The story involves a season in a 12 team sports league, which each team playing all the others, leading up to two semi-finals and a championship game.
I came up with 12 team names, derived from the titles of old movie serials and WWII aircraft.
With the exception of the eponymous team, none of the team names are necessarily final, but since they all start with different letters of the alphabet they serve as placeholders for now.
So there’s eleven weeks of play before the finals. The top four teams get into the semi-finals and go through playoffs to the championship, so they have to be the teams with the most game wins.
One needs to be the eponymous team, of course. Two others need to be the antagonists’ team and another top seated team who can defeat the eponymous team, creating tension and suspense as to whether they’ll be able to make the semi-finals.
So the top team (the antagonists) can be undefeated, the obstacle team can lose one game to the top team, the eponymous team can lose two games, one to the top team, another to the obstacle team.
So I created a grid, team names stacked vertically, game weeks stretched out to the right.
Top three rows were the antagonists, the obstacle, and the eponymous teams with the rest of the teams below that. The very bottom row is the worst team in the league, which loses all its games that year (don’t @ me; their collapse as a competitive team gets explained in the story).
Now, the mistake I made that made the grid difficult to track was in not having the eponymous teams play the rivals in alphabetical order.
As I said, these are placeholder names, to be replaced via cut & paste at the last stage of the first draft. I did not have the eponymous team face their opponents in alphabetical order.
If I had, it would have been easy to align all the other teams’ play as well, just shifting them around in the same order week by week.
Not that this really matters; all’s that is important is that the eponymous team narrow squeaks into the semi-finals. The only crucial stats are the eponymous team being one of the four semi-finalists.
This means the top four teams’ standings must be 12-0, 11-1, 10-2, and 9-3 to get in the semi-finals.
It really doesn’t matter exactly how the other teams do so long as they can’t do better than 8-4.
(In fact, it doesn’t even matter if most of them are named or not unless they’re playing the eponymous team.)
The lesson to be learned here? Unless it’s crucially important, use easy to track placeholder names for things like this.
You can always swap ‘em out later.
© Buzz Dixon
