Monday Writing: Update

Project: sidekicks
Wordcount: 48,000

My Writing Update

For a long time I had the idea in my mind that this story would end up being somewhere between 70k and 80k, but that the first draft (which is always, for me, so much shorter) would be about 60-65k. HA. HAHA! Now, I laugh at myself. Because right now I can't imagine this first draft being anywhere near that. In fact, I suspect it's going to come out closer to 50k than anything else.

This first draft, as I may have mentioned before, is a mess. Just a total mess. It's like if you decided to make a cake so you just dumped all the ingredients in a bowl except maybe you don't have eggs and maybe you only have half as much sugar as you need, so it comes out all weird and gross and like there's something seriously missing.

That's how sidekicks is right about now. I have quite a few storylines that were mentioned in the first third or fourth of the book that just sort of disappeared, and then relationship/character arcs that I know need to be more fleshed out than they are but it's just not happening right now. I feel like I need this thing to settle before I can work out what stays and what goes and what I really, really need to add. So I'm in that place where I just hate the story, mostly. And I'm ready to be done with it. And I don't know why I ever started it in the first place.

But underneath how tired of the story I am and how much I feel like I hate it, I know there's a grain of something else. At the core, there's still the original idea I started with. The idea and the characters that I still love and that, if I keep going -- a second draft, a third, a fourth, until the story is good -- will eventually make the wonderful story I set out to write when I started. And I can't wait for that to happen.

ETA: I have finished the first draft. It is hovering at 50,000 words, about 90% (or more!) of which are just... not good.