158 words — nobody panic

Word­count = 81,196

A friend emailed me today to inform me that he is run­ning ahead of my word count, drop­ping sup­plies. He will loan me his Woody Allen stand-up record when I pass 83,215 and his two Luck­smiths CDs at 85,023. I’d like to make it clear to any­one out there with, say, a large yacht to spare, that I am very much in favour of this kind of thing.

Right.

The more mathematically-inclined reader will have been per­form­ing some basic arith­metic dur­ing my open­ing pan­handle and come to the ineluct­able con­clu­sion that my novel is now a mere 158 words longer than it was yes­ter­day. As a guide, 158 words looks some­thing like this:

words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words

Which, out of con­text, doesn’t seem like much. In order to allay any unne­ces­sary panic which may res­ult from this, here is a basic run­down of the status of The Last Monk as of last night:

The Last Monk cur­rently runs to 29 chapters and one pro­logue in 284 pages. The first 20 chapters, 238 pages, are basic­ally fin­ished and I’m avoid­ing touch­ing those at all until I’m com­pletely fin­ished. Chapter 21 marks the begin­ning of the last act (the syn­op­sis will be online soon, and it’ll be worth com­ing back for), and almost everything from there on was writ­ten in a cre­at­ively fren­zied fort­night last Decem­ber. In the last act, all the big ques­tions are answered, mys­ter­ies revealed and, crit­ic­ally, plot­lines woven together in a tapestry so cun­ning and unex­pec­ted that the reader imme­di­ately goes back to page one to see how the hell it was done.

Which is to say, it’s the really clever bit. The Last Monkhas at least three storylines (rumours of a fourth, lost plot can neither be con­firmed nor denied until the last of the search parties return), which I’ve been hap­pily com­plic­at­ing and mud­dy­ing over five long years. The last act requires me to make it all look delib­er­ate. It’s a big tech­nical exer­cise, for which I like to rely only on my memory and instinct, so if I’m away from the story for a while it gets hard to remem­ber where I’ve left every­one and what I think they’re up to (I’m not always right).

So today’s exer­cise was to read those last eight chapters for the first time since I wrote them, work out if they are any good and assess the work required to get them into the DONE pile. For safety’s sake, and to make nav­ig­a­tion easier, each chapter is a sep­ar­ate MS Word doc­u­ment, so I opened them all and read through from start to finish.

In the same way that cars are an excuse to keep pet­ro­leum com­pan­ies in busi­ness, print­ers are an inven­tion of people who, some­where, own a huge lake of ink and are determ­ined to make money from it. I edit on-screen, except when read­ing the whole manu­script. So as I went through my first-drafty chapters, I sliced and pruned and added and smoothed, with the res­ult that I deleted about half-a-page and added about three-quarters.

Net res­ult: +158 words.

The good news was that I liked almost all of the text. The great fear with a cre­at­ive frenzy (basic­ally a non-stop type-athon where you never go back, never re-read, never stop, just keep head­ing for the hori­zon) is that the res­ult will be a sat­is­fy­ingly long chunk of com­plete nonsense.

Under­stand­ably, then, I was relieved to find this after­noon that what I’ve got is good. There are a couple of big holes (the second rule of the frenzy is if you can’t think of the next idea, jump it and keep going — quickly, the hori­zon is get­ting ahead of you!), and filling them is the work of the next few days. Tomor­row I’ll upload an extract from the chapter I’m work­ing on to give you an idea of what’s hap­pen­ing right now.

So what kind of mile­stones should the gen­er­ous reader set me? Well, I can tell you that the Decem­ber Frenzy bore ten thou­sand words over eight days. That’s 1250 a day, the most pro­duct­ive sus­tained spurt I’ve had.

I have no idea how fast this is likely to go. I think The Last Monk will run to about 95,000 words (about 320 pages in some paper­back formats). I’ll prob­ably write 20,000 or more words to get there. They may all hap­pen now, or in Septem­ber. Let’s find out.