Writer Senses

Word Count: 116,500 Page Count: 502 Double-Spaced Listening to: The Last Airbender: We are Now the Gods by James Newton Howard ____ Yesterday marks the two year anniversary of the completion of the first draft of the first chapter of ARK. A DIFFICULT YEAR One year ago the manuscript contained 90,000 words, this year, just over 116,000. It is startling to think that in one year I wrote 90,000 words and the next less than a third of that. It’s been a difficult year of writing. I mentioned in a previous blog that it took six months to write the climax (chapters 18-23, respectively) of act (or “book”) one. The events of the climax, while complex, still needed to be believable. As my own biggest critic, I asked myself constantly why something less complex wouldn’t have happened, or why this or that wasn’t present in a certain scene when we could reasonably expect it would have been. When I finished book one, I told myself I was not going to go back and edit