Finit Act Four. (And *how*.)

Disabled

My resolution of this morning has led to rank stupidity, of a probably necessary sort.

I had one scene left in Act Four. In keeping with the need for a higher pace, my goal for the night was not one thousand words, but that scene. I wasn’t sure how much that would be.

2169, in case you were wondering.

But wait! There’s more! You see, at that point I was over 89K. And that nice, tasty 90K landmark looked so close. I could write part of the first scene of Act Five, and feel really virtuous.

. . . except that the first scene ended up dropping me a hundred and fifty words shy of 90K, because it was so short.

So, in a fit of sheer bull-headedness, I started the next scene, praying I would get that 150 before I got into the meat of it, since I haven’t yet decided how [spoiler] is going to happen. I should have had two more days to make that decision, going at a normal pace, but tonight was not normal; tonight was 3041 words of headlong charging.

The novel is now 90005 words in length.

Act Four ran long, by a couple thousand words; that isn’t the end of the world, but when I revise I’ll see if I can’t tighten it. Act Five . . . you know how sometimes people say, “I know how long my legs are; they’re long enough to reach the ground”? Act Five will be long enough to reach the end. It may be short. I don’t kow. I’m just praying it doesn’t head too firmly in the other direction, because that would muck up this whole August 8th plan.

Unless I wrote 3K every day. But that would be a bad idea.

In fact, why am I still at my keyboard? Good night.

Authorial sadism: They figured out the plot.

LBR quota: Love and blood — my favorites.

0 Responses to “Finit Act Four. (And *how*.)”

  1. anghara

    {APPLAUSE]!

    (Now go get some sleep)

  2. astres

    Can you describe your Act structure again? I’m really intrigued by it 😛

    • Marie Brennan

      It’s just the classic five-act structure that you see in (for example) Shakespeare’s plays. There are probably all kinds of subtleties to it that I’m not aware of; mostly it suited my purposes to divide the book into five parts, and once I did that, it made sense to call them acts. And they broadly fit the narrative functions that go with that. (Just google “five-act structure” and you’ll find some decent explanations.)

  3. kmousie

    Hurrah! Congratulations! And get some sleep. 🙂

    (In unrelated news, I realized you weren’t on the filter I’m using nearly all the time now for my posts. I’ve remedied the error. Not that you likely have time to read back through things, but you’ll know more about what’s going on with me from here on out!)

  4. kendokamel

    Huzzah!

  5. unforth

    Way to go WAY above and beyond. 😉 And think, there are people on Ni90 who have been writing more than that habitually. I think they’re crazy, personally. Well done, and don’t you dare try to keep up such a finger-blistering pace, it’s not worth it, like, at all. 🙂 A more “reasonable” 1.5-2k, perhaps…

  6. sapphohestia

    You’re a nut! And I know nuts. It really is quite the accomplishment, though. Go you!

    Have you considered that finishing your novel before Texas might mean that you won’t have the energy to do anything but sleep once you get there?

    • Marie Brennan

      I can probably manage a vegetative state on the couch, at the very least. And trust me, that will be better than the state I’d be in if I was still writing.

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