Fanwriting: Making haste slowly

[nebroadwe]

My quondam Fire and Ice Challenge 'fic, now just my latest project, is still not finished, though I've worked on it off and on all week. It's developed a title -- In My End Is My Beginning -- which I don't really like but am going to live with (at least it gives me a way to label the file). I've got enough of a handwritten draft to guess that I'm looking at about 8400 words of typescript and probably 8000 words of finished 'fic. I usually overwrite my drafts and have to delete the tl;dr in revision, and this piece is just chock-full of opportunities for tl;dr, being set some seven years after the end of the manga. (My entire unwritten Al-in-Xing novel is backstory for this piece. [headdesk]) On the other hand, it's nice to be able to estimate how far I have left to go, so that I can make one of these:

4,563 / 8,400 (54.3%)

Further bulletins as events warrant. Must take some time this weekend to read all the Fire and Ice entries properly ...

Comments

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

More than halfway there? *is hopeful*

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Probably less, actually -- word counts are kind of deceptive, because I'm already looking back at what I've got in typescript and thinking, "That bit needs work, and there's something missing there, and I need to slow down the pacing there, and they're being awfully casual about that ... hmmm." On the other hand, I'm much faster at getting revisions done than I am at producing text de novo, so having a finished draft typescript will indicate that I'm getting close to done, so ...

And I need a closing line, dagnabit! Maybe I should just cut the power and let my characters spoon.