Writing: 2,148 words
Turns out that my manuscript is not quite as contiguous as I might have believed.
I knew that my Frontstory was going to require a massive amount of restructuring going forward, and I had not overestimated that task. In short: the Frontstory is a fucking disaster. What I have right now is a scatter of little narrative islands with no ferry system to connect them, and the waters between them are stormy and shark-infested. In roughly four horus, I wrote 2,148 words tonight, but probably only about 1,700 of them were new words. The other 450-odd words came out of two scenes that had previously totaled 1,537 words between them. So if you want to get technical, I also cut 1,083 words tonight from the overall manuscript.
Like I said: fucking disaster.
So here's the new plan as far as word-count goes. What I wrote tonight brings my contiguous manuscript - none of that Backstory/Frontstory nonsense - to 76,982. The pieces of the remainder of the story I currently have written amount to 6,839 words. So while I go about the work of sorting out the mess I've made, I'll be tacking my word-counts onto the 76,982-word manuscript, and treating whichever of those 6,839 words that I use as new words. I'd say that's fair, considering that I'm currently cutting more than twice what I'm using from that particular bucket of writing.
I also have a confession to make. I didn't write last night (that being the night of the 18th). I attended a meeting of the Pamlico County Arts Council's Board of Directors, and didn't get home until eleven o'clock, at which point I was in no mental condition to write. And not that I just didn't feel like writing, because I actually did want to try. But I got all of about two sentences out before I started nodding off at the laptop, and even when I could keep my eyes open, my brain refused to process the signals my eyes were sending to it. So I did what I knew I shouldn't do, and didn't want to do, and wrote the evening off as a creative loss. I doubled-down tonight instead, and wrote two thousand words in order to make up for last night. And so it goes.
In other news, I finished reading Stephen King's novella "1922" this afternoon, thereby completing his latest collection, Full Dark, No Stars. I actually went through the collection in reverse, reading "A Good Marriage" on the 4th, "Fair Extension" (my baseball-addled brain keeps insisting that it's called "Full Extension") on the 5th, "Big Driver" from the 6th to the 9th, and finally the 131-page "1922" from the 10th to the 19th. "1922" is very much written in the tradition of Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls," and it was a solid, if slightly laborious, read. "A Good Marriage" was a rumination on the BTK strangler, "Fair Extension" was a contemporary spin on the Faustian bargain, and "Big Driver" was King's version of The Brave One. "Big Driver" was my favorite of the four, followed by "A Good Marriage," followed by "Fair Extension," followed by "1922." But I still wouldn't grade any of the stories below a VF.
And in the real news, the kind of stuff you can find on CNN, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin were released from prison today after taking a plea deal in which, while continuing to maintain their innocence, they acknowledged that the prosecution had enough evidence (circumstantial though it was) to convince a jury that they had killed Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore in May of 1993. The plea amounts to an admission that the prosecution was in fact able to do what it did in 1994. The downside is that, by technically accepting guilt, Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin forfeit the right to sue the state for false imprisonment, meaning that they won't be compensated for the 18 years they spent in prison for murders they didn't commit. The upshot is that, with time-served, the three of them walked free (albeit with ten-year probation terms) this afternoon.
How could this admittedly excellent bit of news possibly relate to my project at hand? Well it turns out that, in a scene I wrote more than ten years ago, Michael meets Michelle and a group of her friends at the Morris Billiard Hall, and Michelle is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS 3." The book is set in March of 1998, five years after the Robin Hood Hills murders and two years after the documentary film Paradise Lost chronicled the massive miscarriage of justice that was Echols's trial. The pool hall was written in early 2001, shortly after I saw Paradise Lost 2, which documented the failed attempts to appeal the WM3's convictions and explored the likelihood that the boys had in fact been murdered by Christopher's stepfather, Mark Byers.
I have no intention of changing Michelle's t-shirt slogan. In fact, I will almost certainly include a note at the end of my Acknowledgments section reading simply: "And the West Memphis 3 were, in fact, freed on 19 August `2011 after serving 18 years in Hell."
I knew that my Frontstory was going to require a massive amount of restructuring going forward, and I had not overestimated that task. In short: the Frontstory is a fucking disaster. What I have right now is a scatter of little narrative islands with no ferry system to connect them, and the waters between them are stormy and shark-infested. In roughly four horus, I wrote 2,148 words tonight, but probably only about 1,700 of them were new words. The other 450-odd words came out of two scenes that had previously totaled 1,537 words between them. So if you want to get technical, I also cut 1,083 words tonight from the overall manuscript.
Like I said: fucking disaster.
So here's the new plan as far as word-count goes. What I wrote tonight brings my contiguous manuscript - none of that Backstory/Frontstory nonsense - to 76,982. The pieces of the remainder of the story I currently have written amount to 6,839 words. So while I go about the work of sorting out the mess I've made, I'll be tacking my word-counts onto the 76,982-word manuscript, and treating whichever of those 6,839 words that I use as new words. I'd say that's fair, considering that I'm currently cutting more than twice what I'm using from that particular bucket of writing.
I also have a confession to make. I didn't write last night (that being the night of the 18th). I attended a meeting of the Pamlico County Arts Council's Board of Directors, and didn't get home until eleven o'clock, at which point I was in no mental condition to write. And not that I just didn't feel like writing, because I actually did want to try. But I got all of about two sentences out before I started nodding off at the laptop, and even when I could keep my eyes open, my brain refused to process the signals my eyes were sending to it. So I did what I knew I shouldn't do, and didn't want to do, and wrote the evening off as a creative loss. I doubled-down tonight instead, and wrote two thousand words in order to make up for last night. And so it goes.
In other news, I finished reading Stephen King's novella "1922" this afternoon, thereby completing his latest collection, Full Dark, No Stars. I actually went through the collection in reverse, reading "A Good Marriage" on the 4th, "Fair Extension" (my baseball-addled brain keeps insisting that it's called "Full Extension") on the 5th, "Big Driver" from the 6th to the 9th, and finally the 131-page "1922" from the 10th to the 19th. "1922" is very much written in the tradition of Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls," and it was a solid, if slightly laborious, read. "A Good Marriage" was a rumination on the BTK strangler, "Fair Extension" was a contemporary spin on the Faustian bargain, and "Big Driver" was King's version of The Brave One. "Big Driver" was my favorite of the four, followed by "A Good Marriage," followed by "Fair Extension," followed by "1922." But I still wouldn't grade any of the stories below a VF.
And in the real news, the kind of stuff you can find on CNN, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin were released from prison today after taking a plea deal in which, while continuing to maintain their innocence, they acknowledged that the prosecution had enough evidence (circumstantial though it was) to convince a jury that they had killed Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore in May of 1993. The plea amounts to an admission that the prosecution was in fact able to do what it did in 1994. The downside is that, by technically accepting guilt, Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin forfeit the right to sue the state for false imprisonment, meaning that they won't be compensated for the 18 years they spent in prison for murders they didn't commit. The upshot is that, with time-served, the three of them walked free (albeit with ten-year probation terms) this afternoon.
How could this admittedly excellent bit of news possibly relate to my project at hand? Well it turns out that, in a scene I wrote more than ten years ago, Michael meets Michelle and a group of her friends at the Morris Billiard Hall, and Michelle is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS 3." The book is set in March of 1998, five years after the Robin Hood Hills murders and two years after the documentary film Paradise Lost chronicled the massive miscarriage of justice that was Echols's trial. The pool hall was written in early 2001, shortly after I saw Paradise Lost 2, which documented the failed attempts to appeal the WM3's convictions and explored the likelihood that the boys had in fact been murdered by Christopher's stepfather, Mark Byers.
I have no intention of changing Michelle's t-shirt slogan. In fact, I will almost certainly include a note at the end of my Acknowledgments section reading simply: "And the West Memphis 3 were, in fact, freed on 19 August `2011 after serving 18 years in Hell."