Operation: Vineland...Part Two: The Butcher’s Bill

So you know where I’ve been, because you read this. (The pic above is the nook where I wrote each day until the sun superheated the room, at which point I migrated to the area in the pic below.)

Now I’ll tell you what I did for the actual writing part of my writing retreat.

I went in with a few goals. I wanted to complete two specific short stories, and make a serious progress toward a fantasy novel I’ve been working on.

The expected Butcher's Bill:

• LITTLE BIRDIE (short)
• TRASH (short)
• SILVER (novel)

So what did I accomplish?

Not quite what I thought. I only got one more chapter written in the novel. And neither of the short stories are completed first drafts yet. The first one, LITTLE BIRDIE, turned out to be a lot longer than I wanted or anticipated it would be. Like, a lot. I thought it would be 2000-3000 words, a fantasy quickie (don't be creepy). By the time I left the farm it was over 12,000 words and growing. So there's a lesson. Know going in what the end product will actually look like. I didn't.

The second short story, TRASH, proved problematic for different reasons, namely because I’m not even sure about a few key logic points, so writing more would be useless because every other word would be "[technobabble]". So, here's another lesson: understand how to construct the something you're working on before you actually whip out your hammer (don't be creepy). I failed to think through the finer points of the physics I was making up for the story, and that meant that it was nearly impossible to write any of it in a legible, credible way.

I did complete one chapter in the zombie novel, code named SILVER. That part went well. It was the one I started with on the very first day of my retreat, so I was full of vim. It was also the one for which I'd blocked out most of the plot and knew how the characters should work together.

1 out of 3 items checked off. Does that mean the retreat was a failure? No.

I wrote 25,000 words over the course of two weeks. Not a shabby number at all. For some reason, I thought I would write a lot more than that. The number “5000” hovered in my mind. Certainly, driven by a deadline, and riding on a wave of caffeine, I could write that much. I have.

But quantity and quality are two different things. Turns out that even in utopia, I don’t write much more than I do even on a “good day” in Distractionville (aka Real Life). 1500 words seems to be my average. Word count, however, is a pretty crude measure of productivity.

While I wasn’t dumping mondo text onto pages, I was doing something that I usually don’t: finishing drafts. Yes! I didn't knock out the drafts of the two stories I thought I would complete, but I did finish (to first draft stage) a bunch of other things.

The actual Butcher's Bill:

• a short fairy tale set in my world of Nine Kingdoms
• a short noirish story based on a song
• a longer short story titled Musical Family (which, no kidding, was something I first conceived of in 2004).
• a flash story titled "Cubicle Chicks", which needs editing but will be hilarious when it's ready.
• a short story code-named BAD WOLF (not Dr Who fan fic, thanks for asking)
• Little Birdie (wait, what? I said that was unfinished! Okay, so that’s not quite done, but I got really close).

That's a pretty good showing for two weeks of work, almost a story for every 2-3 days. Full disclosure: I had put in some work of most of these stories before retreating. But none were anything close to a nice draft, and some were barely more than glorified notes. But I wasn't showing progress on any until the retreat. And as I said, at least one of those stories has been sitting in my files for years.

But now they’re done. Which is to say, I have several first drafts that all require editing, betareading, more editing, and proofreading. Then they’ll be ready to submit places, or be published by moi.

That’s seven things over the course of about two weeks. Which is awesome. Sure, there’s more work ahead. But I got stuff done, and thus feel pretty badass.

So what did I learn about my habits and process? For that, tune into the final installment.

Acknowledgements:

This installment of Operation: Vineland is brought to you by caffeine. I drank a lot of it over the course of my stay at the vineyard. Pretty much killed a box of Yorkshire Gold black tea. Brewed up pots of cheap coffee (and filled cups with fancy vanilla-flavored creamer).

But the most significant indulgence of my time in this literary utopia was the betabibi. Tipped off after listening to a particularly NSFW Roderick on the Line stored up on the ol’ iPod, I assembled an approximation of the no-longer-made beverage BibiCaffe, which contains approximately everything that my higher self thinks I shouldn’t consume (coffee, sugar, dairy, carbonation, regret). It was pretty good. I drank them until I ran out of seltzer. Then it was back to tea and coffee.