Checks, Books, Bar Graphs

Posted on April 25, 2005    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Well. Got my advance check for The Ghost Brigades today. Guess that means I really do have to start writing it.

More to the point, however, is the fact that I feel ready to write it, which is to say I’ve reached a sufficient point of knowledge regarding certain key scenes and events that I can place them on the line and use them as guidepoints to write toward and past. And even more specifically, I know exactly what’s going to happen in the first two chapters, so writing them will be a relative breeze and it will give me more idea about where subsequent chapters need to go (I also know what I want to write for, say, Chapters Seven, Fourteen and Twenty, although less specifically, but that’s fine too — if you write like I do (i.e., make it up as you go along) you want flexibility).

There’s a trend in the last few months for writers to put up a bar graph in their blogs showing how much they’ve written in a book and how much they intend to write, but I will be having none of that nonsense myself, thank you very much, partly because I have no idea how much I’m going to write, although I suspect it’ll be in the same area as Old Man’s War: 95K words or so. But I don’t think I want the pressure of a bar graph. I’ll let you know when I actually begin; I’ll let you know when I finish and I’ll probably kvetch somewhere in the middle. That should be enough.

Before someone asks: Yes, I’ll probably ask for beta readers, but not before I’m done. I’ll probably keep the numbers small. I will let you know when that happens.