Home Stretch

The end of Word Nerd's first draft of her current work in progress is now about 20K words away.

20,000 words is not small potatoes (for those of you used to page counts instead of word counts, that should be around 60 pages). Still, it is close enough to the end that Word Nerd sees the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Better still, she sees how plot threads through the book are all coming together. Things are happening that she didn't plan to some extent, but the original outline is still in play that's a huge accomplishment. The basic structure is seeming to work and the extra stuff along the way that's been woven in, hopefully, has made it better and more exciting.

Her self-imposed deadline for reaching the end of the manuscript draft is still end of September. However, with the way things are going (which is, knock on wood, well) she's hoping that deadline could be pushed up. (For example, the August goal was 70K words... she's already at 64K and it's only August 8.)

The writing did suffer one minor hiccup -- no, major -- hiccup yesterday.

In perusing that bastion of books, amazon.com, Word Nerd ran across a book in the same genre she's writing in with a protagonist bearing the same odd first name that she had given her main character. Lots of people in the world have the same first name, this is true. But this is fiction. At first, she wondered if it mattered, then decided it did and that a new name must be found. (Case in point, were there to be another series with a boy wizard named Harry, no matter how different it was than the tales about Harry Potter, it would still look like a rip-off. Word Nerd does not want that at all for her main character.)

It was strange, working in the section she was on last night to type a different name and mean the same person. She thinks she's possibly come up with an acceptable replacement. Now she just needs to get used to it.

And finish the novel.