Episode #110: Pffft. How Hard Can It Be?

Another sculpture pic from my local mall, which surprisingly enough, is doing quite well these days, even though they have about a dozen scattered empty storefronts and one very empty anchor retailer. By the way, this mall is roughly near my age {56} in years of existence.

Today's post is once again about The Average American Novel, and starting with this post, I thought it would be fun to track my word count and the various tangents associated with it. This tracking idea came about the same time I'd decided to write this out via pen-paper then transcribing it to the computer {I'd covered the reasoning for this in post #108}. So the stats for the book are as follows:

Total word count: 37,666.

Total handwritten: 14,846.

Total % handwritten: 39.4%.

Scary that over one-third of my story is comprised of four chapters completely handwritten {I believe I have a minimum four chapters left to write}, which with my hands is quite an accomplishment indeed.

As I'd briefly alluded to in a prior post, I do enjoy trying to work in a few aspects of my home state {Connecticut}, as well as my hometown and surrounding areas {including a mountain} into the story. In the original iteration of this story, I went a tad overboard, as newbies are wont to do when writing, with the descriptions of the various parts of the state I was using in the story.

Like, a painfully over-description of traveling from one town to another that makes me cringe now since it was soooo unneeded for the story; ditto for entering the town and driving to a particular house; to a small(ish) degree the last two settings of the story, although now that I think about it, the mountain one should stay in a modified form.

So this time around, I've really pared down the descriptions for all of the key scenes written so far: apartments, area surrounding the apartments, office/warehouse complex, discreet sex club (with the kinky sex really toned down to an NC-17 level as opposed to the usual X level that I write), the city and of course, two different road trips and roadside diners. As they say, sometimes writing your descriptions should be like writing your throwaway characters, minimalist with just enough details to set the scene/get the point across.

I've also discovered, while gutting the original like a cannery worker does with fish, that a key character that suddenly reappears at the end of the story, as well as being featured in the secondary plot, has no real reason for showing up at the end to begin with other than being used as a prop. The problem will be writing a meaningful part/reason/triggering event that becomes the catalyst for him being there. The solution will be writing a meaningful/reason/triggering event that becomes the catalyst for home being there.

Which will not be as difficult as it sounds, since I'm gutting the entire original chapter(s) to the point where they've become just the basic of all basic outlines to work with. Fun times there.

Next week, we will touch upon the primary characters in the story and how they came about.

In the meantime, since this story was originally written back in 2011, I will share with you another post from 2011 from my very 1st blog, Cedar's Mountain. Back in the day, when I was a worker bee/mindless drone, I was on pretty decent terms with my co-workers, and as such, would often get humorous e-mails forwarded to me. 

This post, from January 23, 2011, was one such e-mail. Entitled Connecticut Barbie, it was a very humorous and quite biting take on Barbie as applied to the various parts of Connecticut. Some of you might really get this as you probably have similarly strange pockets in your state as well. In any event, please enjoy this very humorous post from yesteryear.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved