Finished Nine Tonight

I toyed with the idea of making this title rhyme, just like the last one did. Be glad I resisted the urge.

Tonight I finished chapter nine. On Sunday even! Well, sort of. I haven't gone to bed yet, so it's still Sunday.

185 pages. 47083 words.

Nearly 200 pages! Not the first time I've hit it, but I'm excited nevertheless.

This chapter was hard to write at first. Chris is in a new setting, so a lot of description, and a lot of telling rather than showing, to avoid getting bogged down in minutia. It helps that Cor is really digging the story so far, to my great surprise, but still, I started to feel as though I was just churning stuff out, and it wasn't any good. Then today I caught a little bit of second wind. I wrote at least half of the chapter just today, and I was reasonably pleased with it.

I did cut the last scene much shorter than I had projected it to be, but I'm so ridiculously ahead of where I thought I'd be by this point in the story, that I'm not going to worry about it. I think I cut it because it was just going to give too much boring, unnecessary detail, and not simply because I was tired of writing. ;-) I got all the things I really wanted in there.

I'm just about a third of the way through my planned story. There are a few issues I'm tackling as I go, but otherwise I have a pretty good sense of where I'm going with this.

Today I thought about joining a critiquing group, such as Critters, OWW SF&F, Forward Motion, or Baen's Bar. Honestly, the difficulty of figuring out which of them, if any, would be best was a big part of why I haven't yet. The biggest, though, is the time commitment of having to write critiques for other people. Still, I don't want to be a freeloader, and I really do need to start seeking out some good critiques.

I noticed the other day that the hints at Blogger suggest that you make your posts nice and short. Hehehe . . . oh well. Hopefully there are people online who don't mind reading stuff that's not short.