And… scene!
Spent a few hours today tightening up some loose ends on the first draft.
Gave the dog some more face time.
Figured out how we could keep the spray can of bear piss, have it still be relevant, then when to get rid of it.
Wrote a new stanza for the Victorian poetry book that explains some of the creature’s mythos.
Toughest thing was that early scene that we’d skipped… a flashback/fantasy sequence that demonstrates the old lady is living in the past, fixated on her father. We’d finished the beginning and end of the scene but were unsure just what events/dialogue needed to be in there to communicate the two points we thought the scene needed to communicate. It was a deliciously creepy scene that we loved, but couldn’t put a bow on.
The longer we struggled with it, we decided that if it was that hard to decide how the scene should say what it needed to say, maybe it didn’t need to say it. So as hard as it was, we CUT the scene.
45 minutes later, an epiphany, and we realized how we could simply and elegantly, with 3 simple passages of dialogue, do everything we needed to do, PLUS foreshadow some later existing points. Luckily, I’d copied it off to WORD and stored it so we pulled it up, made a few changes, and put it back. SO happy. It’s still creepy, still a favorite, and now is perfect in content as well. The whole thing only added a third of a page.
TOTAL PAGE COUNT: 93.5 — or 97.5 — or 99.8 — depending. (Good ol’ Zhura)
So here we are, with a (pleasantly readable) finished first draft in just:
95.33 hours.
Sean’s got about 88 hours.
96% percent of those hours we worked side by side, so that’s man hours, not clock hours. Clock hours we’re at about 95.33.
Full time 8 hour days would put us at about 12 days to complete this first draft from story outline through last word.
Of course, we worked an average of probably 3.5 hours a day, and not every day. So we’ve used about 6.5 actual weeks to get here.
Copies are now out to our favorite readers for some honest feedback. We hope to live with it for a week, read our hardcopies, get notes from others, and jump on the next rev in about a week.
Till then — WOO HOO!