Starting Wordcount: 37,012
Goal Wordcount: 48,333

I’ll admit, I was seriously thinking about throwing in the towel last night. After a family vacation that turned out to be too much fun to pause and write in, I’m catastrophically behind where I should be in terms of wordcount.

This morning didn’t look much brighter, but I knew there was one trick I had left up my sleeve…

World-building.

Footnotes Away!

Amazingly this year I haven’t yet stopped to gnaw on the scenery, pull apart the history, or sit my fictives down in a corner and ask ‘but what’s my motivation?’ All the normal meanderings on the who’s and the what’s and the buy why’s have been shuffled off to the side while I wrote actual prose. As of this morning there was no prose there that wasn’t meant to be somewhere in the second draft.

But playtime’s over and I have wordcount to make up for.

So welcome to the wild and woolly basement of my brain where all the world-building and plot-building takes place! The wondrous wild goose chases where I go back and hammer out plot inconsistencies and loopholes, give two dimensional characters back stories and driving motivations, and fill in all of those little gaps between what I wrote and what is actually happening.

Is it prose? No, but from long history I can safely say it’s an integral part of my first draft. I’m sure some writers do nothing but prose on the first run through, but if my stories don’t come with an accompanying travelogue/director voice-over… then something is very, very wrong.

I seriously doubt I can pull off a 10k day (which would catch me up to where I am supposed to be), but I’ve got a timer, a stubborn streak several miles wide, and a burning desire to try.

Never give up, never surrender!