Words to Date: 12161
It’s been a long time since I wrote a draft like this without revising at all. It’s a scary thing, because I know from past experience that if I don’t rein myself in with some organization at this point I will have a big mess on my hands.
A few things are helping me keep it together. One, the genre. Some romance novels (called “category” books because they’re for specific imprints like Silhouette Desire) are actually 50,000 words. So I can see this as a whole. Knowing I’m going to knock off an entire draft inspires me. Probably because I love finishing things.
It’s the doing that can be a problem;-)
The Everything Guide to Writing a Romance Novel says that for a category romance, the first 50 pages is set up, the next 100 pages is the middle (where you develop the things you set up in the beginning) and the last 50 pages is the black moment/resolution. I think I got that right. Let me check my graph. Yep, right there on page 93. So that means I’m in the middle.
I learned a while back, through torturous trial and error, that I need to know the ending (specifically the black moment when all seems irretrievably lost) before I can write a coherant middle. So today I did a synopsis of the black moment and the resolution. Then I was able to do a sentence outline for the middle. And now I have my roadmap for the rest of the book, which helps me feel more in control.
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