Archive for March 30th, 2004

3/29/04: Outlining

Word count: 63736 | Since last entry: -4 | This month: 9912 The word count above is completely bogus, but I have no idea what the correct count should be. I have been working on the Book Proposal for most of the last 3 days and it now totals almost 14,000 words of tagline, synopsis, outline, author bio, sample chapters, and other stuff. (I wasted over two hours on Sunday fighting with Microsoft Word’s worthless “master documents” feature, and wound up doing what I’ve done every other time I’ve tried to use that: pasting the sample chapters right into the main document.) That’s a lot of words, and a lot of them are new, but a lot of them are rewritten or synopsized versions of previously existing words. How to count that? And the effort-per-word rate is completely different from drafting; I spent over 2 hours working on my 18-word tagline. (Currently it is: “What is killing the aliens? A computer hacker and his alien ex-lover are more involved than they know.” It’s a little flat, but it was the best I could do in under 20 words.) So, though my automatic word count doesn’t include the Proposal.doc file and shows a net change of only -4 words since the last entry, I’m giving myself a red star for the day on pure effort. Going to sleep now.