Ink Tea Stone Leaf

As I gear up for another writing day,I thought it worthwhile to remind myself how far I’ve come and how much I have accomplished. So let’s start with two statistics:

Chapters completed: 32 (of a projected 35).

Word Count: 92,529 (including the 5,000 words so far written for Chapter 33), after an initial target of 40,000.

Today’s agenda is to correct some things in Chapter 33 that I’ve thought better of since I set them down last week, and from there to finish this chapter, which will effectively contain the climax of the story. After this is done, what will remain is to finish the final two chapters, which will depict the climax and its aftermath from two additional points of view.

If I were still writing at the pace I was maintaining over the summer, I could tell you in all honesty that the first draft of The Ghost of Canard University could be done by the end of next week. However, I haven’t been maintaining that pace for quite some time, in fact since I started tutoring in the fall. I’d like to make a great big push, but with my wife’s birthday and my own in just a few days, I think I will find it hard to focus and devote the necessary time to meet that goal. We’ll just have to see.

It is very close, however. Tantalizingly close. The story seems to cohere; some specific details might not fully make sense, but they can be refined once the narrative is complete. The balance of my three primary characters may need adjusting, but there is something to work with for all of them. There is humor, romance, drama, nostalgia, introspection, and poetry. I think I can show this to people without dying of absolute embarrassment, which is honestly huge for me. I can even imagine a world where people who don’t believe that they have any obligation to encourage and be nice to me could read it with some pleasure. It’s a rough draft, but I have read far worse in published form.

I’ve been tinkering with it a little as I write this, actually. I had forgotten how much I’d established in 31 that I accidentally reduplicated in 33. It’s the little things like that that have to be borne in mind in bringing things to a fine conclusion. What I really need to do to finish strong is to have confidence in my conclusion and in the overall meaning of what I have created. Ha, look at me, “creating” things by tapping on my little keyboard. Tap tap.

The most enjoyable thing about this story has been watching Sean, Sybil, and Eric transform from emanations of my own psyche into people who I have come to understand as separate from myself and my creative endeavor. They are no less imaginary, but they are also more real than they were when I first wrote their names down and tried to figure out things for them to do. Now they’re the point-of-view characters in a nearly finished draft of a plausible novel, which only happens to have been written by me and not some one that people are already calling a novelist.

That’s the state of it (the novel that is). Now that I’ve pumped myself up a little, I had better get back to writing it in earnest. I have a climax to climax, and it’s no good putting that off for too long.