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Status Report
Mar. 20th, 2003 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperI've been wrestling with a lot of stress lately that I won't get into here, but happily, the last couple of days I have managed to break through some writing blocks and get a new scene done. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka is to be loudly commended, for she has helped me make a lot of germs of ideas in my brain come together and make oodles more sense. She's really good at that. :)
My word count is currently 13,070, and I am one scene away from finishing what I started off calling a Prelude and which I think will now be actually a Part 1, since I expect to hit 15K and possibly 16K by the time I finish this last scene, and that's way too long to be a Prelude or Preface or Prologue or whatever the hell.
The interesting question, I suppose, will be whether this stuff winds up actually contributing to my story. Because the main story actually is supposed to start after the events in this here Part 1. I think the first thing I will need people to tell me, once I release this to proofreading eyes, is whether it burdens the flow of the story to be given 15-16K words' worth of backstory. It is IMHO crucial backstory, as it's all character-forming sorts of stuff and crucial events in my three main characters' lives... but I suspect I will probably be too close to the material to really figure out whether the data needs to actually be there or whether I should try to work it in somehow later, when the Main Story begins.
lyonesse and I talked about this a bit on my MUSH; she is, like I am, a fan of being shown something directly rather than just being told about it by some character spouting off after the fact, or by flashbacks. But I'll be wanting to solicit others' opinions on this, once Part 1 is done.
Question for all: should I start making this stuff available for y'all now that I've got this many thousand words? Or would it be more helpful, given the question I have posed above, to actually have some Main Story to compare to, to answer the issue of whether I need sixteen thousand words of backstory? :)
mamishka is to be loudly commended, for she has helped me make a lot of germs of ideas in my brain come together and make oodles more sense. She's really good at that. :)My word count is currently 13,070, and I am one scene away from finishing what I started off calling a Prelude and which I think will now be actually a Part 1, since I expect to hit 15K and possibly 16K by the time I finish this last scene, and that's way too long to be a Prelude or Preface or Prologue or whatever the hell.
The interesting question, I suppose, will be whether this stuff winds up actually contributing to my story. Because the main story actually is supposed to start after the events in this here Part 1. I think the first thing I will need people to tell me, once I release this to proofreading eyes, is whether it burdens the flow of the story to be given 15-16K words' worth of backstory. It is IMHO crucial backstory, as it's all character-forming sorts of stuff and crucial events in my three main characters' lives... but I suspect I will probably be too close to the material to really figure out whether the data needs to actually be there or whether I should try to work it in somehow later, when the Main Story begins.
lyonesse and I talked about this a bit on my MUSH; she is, like I am, a fan of being shown something directly rather than just being told about it by some character spouting off after the fact, or by flashbacks. But I'll be wanting to solicit others' opinions on this, once Part 1 is done.Question for all: should I start making this stuff available for y'all now that I've got this many thousand words? Or would it be more helpful, given the question I have posed above, to actually have some Main Story to compare to, to answer the issue of whether I need sixteen thousand words of backstory? :)
