Aagh, I have to be the lamest writer ever. It took me nearly four days to get a workable fantasy idea for Clarion and now that I have one (+ a decent plot), I’m afraid to write it (and I only have two more days in which to do so).
Clarion does something horrible to your standards. It makes you want to write good stories. A month ago I could have gotten an idea in the morning, knocked out the story in two days, and sent it off on day three (in fact, that’s what I did in week one). Now I carefully sand and polish my ideas before anything is even on paper and then I’m afraid that I won’t be able to realize my vision (which is a lame fear, of course, since I know I can’t realize my vision…that’s why I’m here).
Anyway, this story looks like it’s going to be fairly short. The working title is “The Would-Be King of the Fairyland Dump”. I’m hoping to get a first draft down tonight.
In another news, Kelly Link and Holly Black are here. They seem very neat. Kelly in particular, really seems to get down into the nitty and gritty of what makes a good story.
EDIT: 12:30 AM. I don’t know why I feel the need to give this status report every week, but I’m currently at 1500 words. The actual words are coming very slowly, but I haven’t reached an actual impasse yet. I was right in thinking that it would be short (below 4k words), so I think I’m on track to finish tonight.
EDIT: 7 AM. I’ve been done for a few hours, though it took me far too long. I ended up at 2750 words. Interestingly enough, this means that my story lengths have been as follows.
Week / Wordcount
1 / 7700
2 / 6300
3 / 4700
4 / 3400
5 / 2750
Now, I don’t know about you, but to me that just screams statistical correlation. So I plugged the data into excel and had it run a linear regression. The trendline I got was Words = -1280*Week + 8810 and the r^2 value was a mindblowing 0.9818. Now, in real economic models, the r^2 coefficient (which measures how well the model fits the data and which ranges from 0 to 1) is rarely this high. This is some serious correlation here.
For the curious, if this model holds true, my week 6 word count ought to be 1130 words. Of course, I’ve already biased the model by measuring it, so that probably won’t hold true. Plus, I plan on expanding this week’s story before the tomorrow morning due date. But still, I think that this data says something about my Clarion experience. However, I’m too tired to figure out what that is.