The Week in Words - 12/9/24 - 12/15/24
A week of editing, planning, and ideating.
Output - Data
Total: 4,111 words (10 pages [2,040] + 2,071 typed)
Days Spent Writing: 5/7 days (.714 WrPCT)
AWD: 822/day
Longest Day: 12/10/24 - 1,490 words (3 pages [612] + 878 typed)
The Still Bleepin’ Counts Award: 12/10/24 - 204 words (1 page)
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Output - Synthesis
The week was spent neck deep in invisible work. After marking up the draft I’d printed, I pushed myself to stay focused and get through adding all the changes.
These changes don’t count toward any “Words Added” or Ratio numbers, hence their invisibility. These words are kinda like stats during the NBA Play-in Tournament: they don’t count toward the regular season or the playoffs, rather existing in a sort of liminal place in the table on a player’s Basketball Reference page.
And so my word count is technically higher, but there’s really no need to dig deeper into it, especially when it starts requiring more math.
I am officially itching to start “Boom,” our next cycle, but there is still discrete work to be done: namely, reading the damn thing front to back—not to line edit and make changes, but to absorb what I’ve written and see how its rhythm kinda feels in my head. Every single page has some little thing that I want to change, which is why I’m reading it as a PDF instead of a Google Doc. I need to trap it in amber if I’m gonna study its form, y’know?
It’s about the vibes, mannn
And figuring out what exactly I set up without ever paying off.
Like the fact that O’Doyle1 can see the Quiet Council, and that his opinion that they’re demons is never really resolved. This will thus come up in this next sequence.
Or that there were four Socialites lost along the way but they’re rarely mentioned by name—except right at the beginning when, I admit, I better remembered their existence. But since then their part in the narrative’s been far too light on the gradient, and I need to bring it further into contrast with specifics so as to turn what seems superfluous and cast off into texture and depth for our minor characters.
And the line edits? They can wait a bit longer—as they already have been. I know I’ll need to do them, but it will be more beneficial to tackle all of them when the storyline is complete, when I know what I’m paying off in the end and thereby need to set up in the beginning.
I’d rather not spend my time chasing my tail, basically. With everything before me, I can’t get further bogged down in what I’ve already written.
But once we’re done reading these 80ish pages, it’ll be time to organize and synthesize and concretize all my notes and thoughts and ideas for this cycle, to find its throughline and stakes and consequences. This is the penultimate cycle in Maribel’s story, so I need it to reflect everything that’s come before and also make it somehow a harbinger of the great flood to come.
So I’ve gotta read it back, even though I always at first get crippled with the fear that it’s awful and irreparable, an unfounded anxiety that builds its wall of resistance around me.
Once I break through, though, it allows me to be surprised when I actually like what I’ve put to the page. So far, I’m actually diggin’ the vibes, which is reassuring. Who knows, maybe I’ll come to y’all next week and be like, “My God, what have I done!”.
Input
Data
Book: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Starting Page: 141
Ending Page: 206
Days Read: 3
Pages Read: 65
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Book: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Starting Page: 27
Ending Page: 40
Days Read: 1
Pages Read: 13
“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” -Pg. 35
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4/7 days (.429 rPCT)
Combined Pages Read: 78
Combined Pages Per Day: 19.5
Synthesis
The most interesting thing happened in As I Lay Dying: following the climactic and chaotic river-crossing sequence, the book switched from present tense to past tense in order to have a sequence voiced by the late Addie Bundren.
After this sequence, when we return the present of the storyline, I expected the verb tense to switch back too. Faulkner, however, doesn’t switch back: the present is now told in the past.
When commingled like this, the sense that time is fluid is born—that, once this threshold is crossed, there is no longer a clear indicator that actions are happening in the present, or when Addie was alive.
Controlling the verb tense like this always impresses me if only because it’s something I’ve always struggled with—in fact, I think I’ve even talked about it here before. Faulkner’s totally in control, and understood exactly what effect this strategy was going to create.
I’m down to the last 60 pages and I’m equally excited to see if there’s any form of resolution or return with the verb tenses. We’re in the soup now, that’s for sure, and suddenly finishing the book by year’s end feels far more feasible—only 54 cluckin’ pages left!
"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is our not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rin and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
-As I Lay Frying, pg. 80-81-30-
Update Archives ⥁⥀⥁ Appendices ⥁⥀⥁ Fiction ⥁⥀⥁ Non-Fiction
Patrick O’Doyle is a shop owner in his 30’s. When the Socialites first arrives, he helps them survive. He has green eyes and fiery red hair that is always and fastidiously combed to the side with a sharp part, adhered to his scalp by a layer of pomade. A stout man who was much heavier set when he settled in the wilderness. He arrived from the north, leaving the temptations of Graceport for a quiet life away from sin. And now they’re trying to build a city around him.
You might want to edit Faulkner’s title to As I Lay Dying rather than frying.
Also, always remember that Dickens would, in the initial chapters, intro Duce characters whose value is not known until much later in the book and normally around the end. An interesting concept but not necessarily helpful for you.