Writing Ray - Where I'm at with things

Evenin' folks! I thought that I'd do a bit of a post Nano update talking about where I'm at currently with my writing shenanigans (God I love that word). I haven't done much writing since I hit my camp goal, little bits on a couple of scenes that are going to go towards the end of the book and also one which is purely for the repayment of feels to my dearest Alpha reader and Twinnie Jess since she was rather upset with me after she read the dreaded Dramatic Death Scene.

So I'm not going to be allowed to kill any more of my protags for at least one book - which is fine by me since I have already created for myself a musical trigger for tears from writing that death scene. Which is going to be very awkward later this month when Le Boyf and I go to London to see Yoshiki (Former drummer for the band X Japan) play his classical piano music which does include orchestral versions of some of their songs - two of which were playing as I wrote the final bit of the DDS. So it's very likely that I'm going to burst into tears in the concert hall on hearing either of those songs (One is ironically enough *called* Tears - skip to about 3mins in and then tell me that you wouldn't well up. The other is Forever Love - this is a shorter version and do excuse wet Yoshiki :P).

The plan for the next few months is going to be to get the end of the book done (only two scenes left I reckon) and start working on the beginning. Due to how I started writing this project I have the first scene I wrote being the first time my two main characters meet which I have got to write up to and then continue with the next section of the story. Originally I thought this scene was going to occur about a third of the way through the book, but now that I've written about half of the first draft I think it's going to have to come earlier than that.

But then will come the question of do I need to re-write that scene when I get to it? How drastically different has my writing become from that first scene to now? I don't really want to the consider the possibility that I've got worse from that point but one should never rule these things out and with me I have found that the more I do something the worse I get at it in certain bizarre occasions (cf. my book reviewing). It's shit like this that keeps me panicking.

However I gotta keep that neurotic side of my brain crammed in a teeny-tiny box otherwise it'll just jettison my confidence in this book and I'll stop completely - which I really don't want to do. Seriously I am really fucking enjoying writing this book even when it's mashing my brain or making me cry.

All being well I should hopefully *fingers crossed* have my first draft done by the time I finish work in July so I can spend leisurely days sat outside with a stack of paper (heck knows I will need to buy a efficient printer with affordable ink) and a heap of red pens alongside Jess editing this thing into something that works as whole and not in chunks.

I don't currently plan to even attempt to publish it, that is just something I don't have the energy or mental fortitude to put myself through. I want to finish a book, for me, so that I can say that I have *finished* something before I continue writing the second book, which may eventually turn into three depending on how out of control the world-building gets and what plot bunnies spring up from that. If I get to the end of writing this story, however long it turns out to be, and I am happy enough with it that I'd like to start submitting it then maybe I will. But that won't be for a while yet.

Until then I'm just gonna keep plodding on with it and dragging y'all along with me if you don't mind.
Current rough count on the manuscript is probably around 57,000 words but that's with two scenes to write and one to complete that I kind of abandoned. So by the time I hit the "end" of the book I should be at around 60K.

Now this post has got really lengthy and kinda meandering so I'm gonna go back and carry on with this scene that is going to hopefully stop me receiving Howlers :P
Until next time folks
Ray