WIP Wednesday: Weeks 10+11

Days Left to Deadline: -1
Days Worked On: A grand total of 1
Morale: Err, good or something?!
Total Word Count: 99,902

Thoughts: Well . . . despite not really writing at all for the last forever, there are some good things to report:

1. I am finally done moving. No more 12-hour car rides from hell. No more lugging boxes up and down stairs and into 60 mph winds. No more sleeping on a sofa bed.
2. I finally have internet again. Yes. Full-fledged internet access where pages load quickly and where I can actually access Blogger to reply to your comments and where I can abuse Spotify to my heart's content.
3. There is no three, but the list seemed incomplete with only two items. Let's just say that with the advent one one and two, life is better.

Okay, so none of those things are really writing related . . . but they give me hope for upcoming productivity in the coming weeks! *shakes fist*

Anyway, you also may have noticed how I am, uhh, one day past my self-imposed goal of doom. This is because I failed. Not only did I fail, I failed pretty miserably. The original goal was to edit my entire WIP by March 6th at 11:59 PM so I could have taken less than a year to edit it. Because, umm, it's super depressing to consider how slow I am. Unfortunately . . . I edited about a third of it. Less than a third.

HOWEVER. Something good did come of this failed experiment:

I have edited 18,209-ish words of my WIP!

And I did cut 3,657 words out of that stuff I edited!

And there are only 79,735-ish words left to edit!

*tosses confetti*

Yay for the bright side! I think I might keep up these WIP Wednesday posts until I actually make the freaking goal. It seems fitting. And I like to pretend that you guys are holding me accountable or something. I doubt anyone really is . . . but I feel bad whenever I have to write the "I suck and didn't write this week" posts. SO BRING ON THE GUILT.

Now tell me, have any of you failed a writing goal before? Was it because the goal in itself was outlandish, or was it because life reared its ugly head? Tell me what happened in the comments!

On the road again

If you've been a longtime follower of Squidink, you might remember when I went to Portland, OR last spring. If not that's cool. All you really need to know is that that trip was all about apartment hunting and that, uhh, I didn't end up getting an apartment.

But I finally have an update: I'm officially moving to the Portland area!

I don't have too many details yet--most of them still need to be ironed out--but I'm heading over there on Monday. Thus, I've been packing all week . . . which sucks . . . but I'm almost done and moving definitely makes up for cardboard box hell.

Boxes are more plentiful than they appear.

Anyway. Do you guys have any good news to share? It doesn't have to be anything big--sometimes you have to set aside some excitement for the little things in life. So tell me what you guys are up to in the comments!

Completing a manuscript is awesome sauce

As some of you may remember, I challenged myself to finish the first draft of my manuscript by March 7th. I am here to tell you guys that somehow I pulled this off. *throws confetti and binder clips into the air*

Later today I have great ambitions called going to OfficeMax, getting the manuscript printed, and buying special office supplies so I can rip it to shreds in a month. It will be awesome.

For a little background, this is the first novel length manuscript that I have actually finished. I'm astounded and impressed at the same time. And really happy.

The original draft of my WIP was actually written in 2008 during NaNoWriMo, but it was really more like a glorified outline than a draft because it sucked. A lot. So last August I trashed it and started re-writing the entire thing, which is hopefully a thousand times better now. If nothing else, I can safely say that the melodrama and injury count have gone up exponentially.

Anyway, I thought it would be kind of cool to make a Wordle of the entire manuscript for everyone's entertainment. If you've never heard of Wordle, it's a generator makes a cloud based on word frequency in a text (this is, of course, minus common words like "the"). Note the very large names of my characters, the fact that I apparently talk about eyes a lot, and the random flowers interspersed between other words.

I kind of wonder why I apparently used "one" so often. Heh, I must have had a wonderful reason.

Wasn't that exciting? Now I'm going to throw stats at you. They're not that interesting, I guess, but I kind of want to record them for posterity.

Working Title: Kai Story Part 1
Genre: YA (Epic?) Fantasy
Total Word Count: 103,559
Chapters: 23
Average Chapter Length: 4,503
Different Point-of-Views: 3
Months Worked On: 6-ish
Awesome Songs That Helped: You're Gonna Go Far, Kid by The Offspring, Monster by Skillet, Devour by Shinedown, Beautiful Bride by Flyleaf, Nothing and Everything by Red, Rolling in the Deep by Adele, Blinding by Florence + The Machine, and Decode by Paramore.

So, what about you guys? Have you ever finished a novel length manuscript? Or are you puttering away at it right now? Tell me in the comments--let's commiserate together!