Yesterday I reached my first goal of 50,000 words in my work in progress. Personally, this is a huge accomplishment for me so I was really excited! I told my husband, posted an update on Twitter, and had a celebratory cup of coffee.
My husband, who seemed pleased for me, said “Is that what you have to have for it to be done?” Well no actually it’s not. Then a successful agent on Twitter posted something along the lines of:
“I hate when I get query letters from talented authors with wonderful stories that are less than 80,000 words. I don’t even open them because adult fiction has to be from 80,000 to 110,000 words.” (Excuse my extreme paraphrasing from memory.)
Ouch! Taking her words to heart if I had a guess I’d say I’m about 30,000 words away from finished which is truthfully a bit daunting seeing as how I have been working on these 50,000 words for literal years. I have gone through extremely productive spurts and then put my work down for months and even years at a time. To help relieve some of the anxiety associated with producing another 30,000 words I created a NaNoWriMo profile. Honestly, I really like that it says if I want to be finished by the time I go back to school in August I only need 153 words per day or 1,071 words per week. Shoot, I can do that! I hope that this method of goal setting will help me to stay on track. There is nothing I love more than finishing a goal ahead of time, I mean really I’m a beat the GPS kind of girl. Arriving at your destination in 7 months? Alright, BET.
Aside from actually producing 30,000 additional words, I am slightly concerned that my story doesn’t have enough valuable content to meet this goal. I mean there are definitely some loose ends outside of the main storyline that are going to require some tying up so last night I made myself a Google Sheets timeline that spans the entire story, start to finish. This helps me to visualize my story in a way that also shows where there might be some rather large gaps in time or information. I guess we will see where my writing takes me and reassess later but for now I am off to do a little research on what the life of a peddler looked like in 1793 because one is about to knock on the door of Father and Mrs. Quinn.
The Neophyte Novelist 