45028 / 50000 words. 90% done!

Woot, 90% mark! I’m cruising in at 1666 words a day at least, because otherwise I’m not going to finish. I suspect something will happen over the next few days that will prevent me from writing, so it’s good that I’m a day ahead. I’d rather be more, but eh, I work with what I got. If I really wanted to cut it down to the wire, I could get away with a little over 1000 words a day, but I’d rather not if it’s all the same.

Right now is probably a good time to look back at what I’ve written and determine, well, what the hell have I got here? io9 has a nice article on How to Tell if the First Draft of Your Novel Just Isn’t Worth Salvaging; I found the advice for vitalizing the first draft (or, as I like to think of what I’ve just written, Draft Zero) after the fact to be more interesting than the process-of-elimination advice at the beginning.

Strangely, looking back I realize I haven’t written a practice novel. I’ve written a draft for practice, which is different. I went into NaNoWriMo intending this novel to be a sacrificial lamb, and it turns out to have potential after all. I’m working out the biggest problems with my initial ideas, and of course running into other problems—but I’ve had the freedom to explore different paths to victory. Which results in draft time loops and gaps in the timeline and a lot of struck-out text, but I don’t care; it’s Draft Zero.

I don’t have so much of a skeleton as a jumble of fossil bits and pieces I need to dig out, and there are bits missing that I’ll have to reconstruct, and then rearrange into a skeleton. That will be Draft One. And then I can start putting the meat on. Which means I’ll only have something ready for John Klima to go over in… say… next year. Sigh. Hopefully after a few more drafts I can send the thing off to a script doctor, and then shop it about. It’ll take a year, all told, I think; maybe more, as I feel my way along.

Part of me is tempted to self-publish this as a serial. I’m going to hold back from that until it’s been shopped around for a while.