Elin’s Story: The Next 80000 Words

This I intended to write three weeks ago at the end of August, but as usual time ran out.

At the beginning of July I set out to write my first full draft of Elin’s Story from beginning to end. To encourage myself (and provide a small degree of entertainment for my various friends who have been hearing about the novel for two years or more without seeing any results), I put a progress metre on my homepage and fairly faithfully updated it daily. My target was 105,000 words and I had the whole of July and August to achieve it. Two thousand words a day, for sixty days – sure, that would do it.

Oh dear, not even close.

As I approached the end of August I realised I had managed to write on just 39 days of the 60 and had produced not quite 25,000 words of copy (with a little more than 10,000 words of back-story). That works out at 884 words-a-day. Disappointing, but on the other hand, not so bad. It is, after all, 884 words-a-day more than nothing at all.

Back from holiday now, with the autumn rain rattling on the window, I am facing a clear stretch of, say, 90 days before Christmas. If I can keep up the same average rate, and write every day between now and then, I might still manage to complete the draft by the end of the year.

And so, I shall push on. From Monday 20th September, expect to see the progress metres crawling forward again.

Notes

Sadly the progress metres I wrote about in this article seem to have disappeared. I’ve removed the dead links. [May 2020]

The header image is the portrait of A Young Lady Aged 21 held at the Tate Gallery in London. This is possibly a portrait of Elin Ulffdotter (Bååt later styled Snakenborg) who became Lady Helena Marchioness of Northampton.