OK, well, “high score” might be a weird term for it, but I just finished typing in almost all of the stuff I’ve been writing lately. My current page count as of this moment is 129, with a word count of just over 33,000. In the last two weeks I’ve written almost 7,000 words and very nearly 30 pages. This afternoon I faltered; I got right up into the middle of the Act Two climax and took a wrong turn. I didn’t get far into the wrong turn before I realized it was a wrong turn, but still, I blew about an hour or so trundling down that particular path before I realized, no, sir, I don’t like it.
(Extra points to those of you in the crowd who caught the reference.)
Still, at 33,000 words I feel like we’re on a good path to the end of the book, if I can get through this next part in one piece. The novel will be as long as it needs to be, but now that I feel like I can see the end without a telescope I’m wondering exactly how long that actually is. I don’t think breaking 50,000 words is going to be a problem (so it’ll still be a novel according to the NaNoWriMo definition), but I don’t want to make it drag on for sheer virtue of making it longer. That seems silly. I wonder what the average length of a novel is these days, anyway?
What’s absurd about this right now: one thing that’s definitely spurred on this most recent creative streak is my decision to keep it small. To keep it tight. At one point I’d decided that the entire story was going to pack up and fly to Washington, DC for Act Two. I got about fifteen pages into that wrong turn before I realized that I already had too many characters without wanting to resort to introducing the cast of the Washington, DC division. So the whole story is going to take place in the same town – which, bizarrely enough, I’m discovering was probably what I had in mind since Day One. No joke, here I am writing new scenes literally years after I wrote their predecessors, and I’m finding myself saying, “Oh, yeah – that’s why that abandoned car was in the woods!”
My mind is a strange and freaky place to hang out, believe you me.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
