Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Winning, but not finishing


On November 27th, I uploaded my text thus far, and I was over 50,000 words. I was declared a winner, and I got to download my "trophies":


So, that's cool. Just one problem. I'm not finished.

When I reached 40,000 words, I recognized that the rest of the story would not fit in 10,000 more words. When I officially reached winner status, I started to go into outline mode and fill out the rest of the novel. I wrote snippets of prose and dialog from "future" pages in the book. These snippets were not descriptions of what would happen; they were like little glimpses into the future. Here is an example:

Jim and Zach walked up the closed gates of Humbert's mansion. Zach wore the huge 10 gallon hat that had once belonged to an abomination named Sheriff Shorty.

The gate swung open. The pair walked toward the imposing doors of the mansion.

Roman Jacobs scanned Sara for a briefcase, or a folder, or anything that might hold a document. "Miss, what do you have for me?"
Sara reached inside her purse and pulled out the snub nose revolver. "This, your honor. Now please sit down."

Ed looked around, the judge's smoldering glance following him. "Did you replace your mirror, your honor? I'm sure you did. Now, where is it?"


The spaces are where I fill in the surrounding story. Reading over it reminded me of something. It was like the beginning of part 2 of a 2 part TV show, where they recap what happened last week in little slivers of video. Except I'm going over what will happen.

When this was done, I had about 5 pages of broken story. I expect to end up with quite a bit more when it's finished (hopefully by the 30th, so I can feel like a real winner), and possibly a lot more on the second draft.

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