Some
friends and acquaintances of mine have noticed me writing and working
on some sort of manuscript. It's neither surprise nor a secret, I am
writing a book. More specifically, I'm writing a work of fiction. I've
been writing a lot of prose fiction ever since I wasn't even in high
school, though some of those works were lost either accidentally or
intentionally by me.
I have had a lot of ideas for
writing a fiction novel during the last five years or so, but none of
them ever even made past the simple 10,000 word count checkpoint. The
reasons are probably because I can't find the time to work, and that I
can't seem to string together a coherent plot that doesn't entirely
sound like I hastily pulled it out of my ass.
I am not
going to put in any specific details on this novel that I'm working on,
nor am I going to hand out a plot summary of it. Those things will come
once the first self-edits of every chapter and scene in my novel are done and
I'll have to go find and coerce an unlucky person to edit my work again. But
here's a hint for the persistent: It's set in (sort of) present day
September 2012 in the Philippines, and it has something to do with
international politics. It's a work of fiction that branches itself out from real-world events of that time. A lot of the places I used in my novel are also very much real. The genre is mostly thriller with bits of
mystery thrown in here and there.
To prevent myself from slacking off and procrastinating by just deciding to play Sid Meier's Civilization V or Payday: The Heist all day, I've set a short term and two long term goals for my writing. The short term goal is, write at least 750 words a day. Does that sound too easy for a goal? Not really, especially when you're trying to make the plot as realistic, plausible and detailed as something you can find in a Robert Ludlum novel. I have noted a few days where I was not able to meet my short-term goal, or even wrote a single word on the pending chapter.
The long term goals are 45,000 words and 80,000 words for the entire novel. 45,000 words is 5,000 words short of the word count requirement for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), though I have some recollections of their word count requirement being only 45,000 or even 40,000. The second goal, 80,000, is the average word count of a lot of popular fiction novels. The 80,000-100,000 word count range is also comically referred to as the "zone where the publishers and agents actually take your manuscript seriously".
I'm writing my work in vim, typesetting it with LaTeX, and outputting it in a PDF using pdflatex, because who needs "word processors" anyway? I also wrote a small Python script that calculates the word count of each individual chapter and the entire manuscript itself, and calculates how much (in percentage) I have done to reach my long-term goals. There is a margin of error in its calculation of word count, however, since wc also counts my LaTeX comments and commands as words.
Hopefully by the next week or two I'll be able to finish the entire first draft of the manuscript. I'll begin editing by then, and at the start of November, I'll begin work on another novel to participate in this year's NaNoWriMo.
