I just passed 10,000 words on my novel thing!!

FudgeBrace

YAY!!!!!

EileenG

Congratulations.

What sort of novel thing?

FudgeBrace

THANKS! I'm actually so happy and proud haha.
I mean that I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it long enough for an novel, so it might be a small novel..thing.

hoopla87

congratulations!! its such a great feeling when you see things coming together on paper like that, keep on truckin' you might find the story evolves and grows new things on its own so i wouldn't rule out a full novel yet if i was you.

FudgeBrace

hoopla87 wrote: »

congratulations!! its such a great feeling when you see things coming together on paper like that, keep on truckin' you might find the story evolves and grows new things on its own so i wouldn't rule out a full novel yet if i was you.

yeah it really is.! And I like to set goals like reach a certain amount of words or something. FEELS GOOD! haha thanks

dogmax

Congratulations FudgeBrace, Congratulations indeed, keep the flow going and the words will follow.

Ah the joys of it all.

Rubecula

Very well done FudgeBrace. You have every reason to feel proud.

FudgeBrace

14000!! haha yayayayayayaya

38Flowers

Well done Fudgebrace! Keep it up

FudgeBrace

Thanks so much everyone! It's so good to have so much support! But I must admit that I have abandoned hope and faith on this novel I just isn't see where it was going to be honest, but somecharacters stuck with me so that's good I guess

alfa beta

Don't worry fudge.

Twice before I've abandoned novels - and that was after 100,000 words + many revisions. In fact it was at the point of being told by agents and publishers that they were...well...****e (not in so many words you understand!)

But I did notice something during the course of the abandonment.

I noticed that my writing was actually getting better.

In fact by the end of novel two it was almost unrecognizable when compared to the start of novel one.

So I figured that with every word I put on paper, every sentence I glued together, every paragraph I agonized over and every chapter I muddled through I was in fact improving. Slowly but surely improving.

'Slowly but surely' being the operative words.

I realized that practice was what I needed and that practice would take time. I began to admit to myself that I wasn't going to be the precocious young talent, the prodigy I had once dreamt of but that with perseverance and hard work I might someday achieve a level of literary ability which I myself would be happy with and others might deem acceptable. In a nutshell I began to take a more realistic, long term view of what I was trying to do.

Then, well, let's see, oh yeah, I stopped writing.

And got a job and moved country and got married and had kids and got more jobs and moved to more countries and so on and so on. You know yourself, life has a tendency to upset the best made plans!

Funnily enough as I grew older my jobs gradually swung back towards what I guess was always the closest subject to my heart - the English language - and I ended up eventually becoming a freelance commercial copywriter. Brochures, ads, websites, internal corporate communications and all that sort of thing. Nice big clients too, Mercedes-Benz, Abbey National, Aston Martin and many others. The beauty about this commercial work was that practice was forced upon you. You had to get it right. If a client thought what you did was wrong, they told you so and you rewrote until it was right - or at very least 'on-brief'. If their tone-of-voice was out of key you sat there and fine-tuned it until it was pitch-perfect. What's more, you became keenly aware of your reader - let's face it, if you didn't understand the 'C-Class Leaseback deal for Business Customers' that poor reader was hardly gonna grasp the finer points.

Through this sort of work I realised I was still practicing, still playing with words, still trying to streamline the way I said things, trying to bring linguistic clarity to where once sat a big messy blob of corporate confusion!

Anyway, enough of that.

Back to the real world. The reason we're all here. You, me and all the boards-addicted keyboard tappers in our midst - desperately trying to sculpt seminal stories from the marble in their minds (ouch, that's not a metaphor, that's a monstrosity!)

Yup, the real world. Now more than twenty years after last 'having a go' I've returned to it - that wonderful, big, scary, intimidating world called 'novel-land'. And, you know what, this time, for the first time, I've got a feeling that what I'm doing might just be okay...

...then again, who knows, it might very well be ****e too.

But, hey, if it is, I'll abandon it and put it down to practice - you know, for the next attempt!

You see, Fudgie, that's the thing I figure now - you're in this game for the long haul, so keep writing, keep writing and keep writing and whatever you do, don't lose faith!

Gryphonboy

Great advice there Alfa.

speedboatchase

Congrats Fudge. I finally finished my book this week after nearly two years and the feeling of elation has been with me every day since.