Staying Over 1000

Well I've managed to stay over 1000 words for the second day in a row. My trusty wordcount spreadsheet tells me I haven't managed that since the first of December. I'm not as happy about today's work as I was about yesterday's. It's a reasonable stretch of first draft when all is said and done, but the exposition, however necessary it may be in a fantasy novel, is just a little too thick for me. Especially since it's coming 115k words into the book. By now I really should have set up just how things work in this world so I could just concentrate on actually bringing the book to an end.

The truly good news in all this is that my inner editor seems to have taken a short vacation. Even though I knew what I was writing wasn't perfect I managed to keep writing, rather than agonising over trying to get it perfect. This is important to me because I have fallen into the trap of eternal revisions on an incomplete manuscript before. Although I learned a lot from doing that it's not ultimately an effective way of writing books. It helped when I switched from writing in my native language (Dutch) to writing in English, but rendered me incapable of finishing anything.

It wasn't until I decided to just keep on writing until I had a reason to put "The End" at the bottom of a page that I finished a novel. Granted chances of that particular novel every being published are slim to none, it's not that good a novel, but I learned more from doing that than I would have from five revisions of an incomplete draft. And for all I know some form of it might be published. When I recently read it myself (revisiting old sins) I found I could actually see how to fix a number of the bigger errors.

I'm quite envious of people who can revise as they go without any problems. Maybe I'll be able to do that as well some day, but it would take something major to even make me try. Linear start to finish writing with no editing (except the occasional spelling error or missing word) works for me.