Quinn Blogs

Hubris – that is, the first draft of Hubris – is complete.  90,000 words have brought me to the most wonderful words to write in all writingdom: The End.  That wordcount, incidentally, makes this book the longest piece of writing I’ve ever done.  That’s not interesting to anyone but me, but welcome to the blogosphere.

Now two things await me: champagne and sleep.  Someday soon I will have to face the long agony that is revision, but for now, I get to relax while my third novel sits dormant and awaits my return.

I’ve abandoned my 1000-word-a-day goal, but that’s a good thing. Now I’m sprinting for the finish line. In the last three days I’ve written something like 5,000 words and I’m almost to the big climactic climax of the story. There’s a lot that goes on in the end of this book; it may need to be streamlined when the time comes for revision. I’m doing my best not to worry about that yet.

This is the point, for me, when writing begins to feel like mild insanity. The story starts to follow me everywhere and distracts me when I’m trying to have conversations. I wake up from convoluted dreams starring my characters and plot points (once, when I was writing my first novel, I swear I had a dream in text. No joke) and I have trouble falling back [...]

I just passed the 200 page mark yesterday. It’s a good feeling, but it’s not as exciting as passing 100 pages or 50,000 words. And nothing is as exciting as getting to the last page and typing the wondrous words “The End.”

This has been pretty consistent for me through the writing of all three of my novels. My level of excitement can be charted like so:

Yes, I’m an xckd fan. But I think knowing and expecting the ups and downs of the writing process can be valuable. Optimism and energy will flag as you go along; that’s just the nature of the beast. You’ll have moments when you wonder if you’re just wasting your time, writing a bunch of drivel no one will ever want to read. And even when you’re not stewing in self-doubt, sometimes writing a [...]