Pagemeters and other lies
Posted by CM under Legalese on Sun 9 Sep 2007
o, the little progress bar on the left very cheerily tells me I have 8% of this book left to finish.
Ha ha ha. By my estimation, I am at least 50 pages away from the end of the book. And that doesn’t even begin to consider the countless chapters that need to be shored up, the more countless chapters that need to be condensed, and the countless revisions I need to do to make motivations consistent. The closer I get to the end of the book, the more I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole. And it becomes increasingly likely that I will feel like the mole.
What’s the biggest lie your pagemeter, or your wordmeter, or–for the sake of not excluding any other meters out there, your pedometer–has ever told you? Or what’s the biggest lie that you have ever told it?
September 9th, 2007 at 7:34 am
My meters lie exactly the way yours does. I don’t worry about it.
September 9th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I adhere strictly to the Word word count, mentally subtracting those pesky “Chapter 13s.” And I always want everything to be over around 75,000 words, which would be great if I were writing a category romance and had actually arrived at the ending.
September 9th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Yep, I’m whacking all the same moles. My pagemeter says I’m two-thirds done. I’m guessing the reality is more like one-third. But even if lots of those pages are going to change, I still think I deserve credit for writing them!
September 9th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Maggie, I admire your ability to adhere strictly to anything. And Alice, I admire your ability not to worry! Tessa, I admire your ability to give yourself credit. In fact, I just admire you all.
The worst part is that everyone says things like, “keep writing; just finish; you can revise later.” How many times have I heard the Nora Roberts line “you can’t fix a blank page”? The truth of the matter is, you can’t screw up a book with a blank page, either. Gah.
Every time I try to write the chapters I haven’t written, I stall out, and it’s because I KNOW I have to rewrite some other things in order to make everything work. I’ve pushed at this long enough that I think I just need to bite the bullet and do the rewrites, and hope that everything will fall into place as soon as I figure out what I really should have done.
This novel-writing thing is not easy. You can’t write the beginning until you know the end, and you can’t write the end until you know the beginning, and you have to write the middle before you can get to the end, but if you write the wrong middle you’ll never get to it!
Damned mole.
September 10th, 2007 at 6:45 am
CM - it’s like you just wrote down everything that goes through my head when I sit down to write. I got almost halfway through the dang WIP and realized I had no conflict - NONE - and had to go back to the beginning to fix it. Now, one friend said just keep writing and fix that later but the changes were too big. I couldn’t do that. So I’m actually back to working on chapter 3, adding and deleting as I go.
The worst part is, since I’m so new to all this, I’ll get back up to chapter 8 and I’ll learn another new, monumental thing and it’ll be back to the beginning again. *sigh* It’s never ending.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:38 am
My biggest meter lie- my word count says I’m done, but like you I’m cutting, adding, rearranging. Who knows what I have. I know I don’t. Glad I am not the only one out there.
Speaking of pedometers, I had one once that said I only walked 3 steps, excuse me I just cleared 2 miles in 28 minutes. So I got a new pedometer and it pretty much did the same thing. I guess they don’t like me much.
September 10th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Well my current pagemeter says I am at 70700, but I just pulled up my WIP and word says 71095. Oops. But maybe it’s safe to call it a 1st draft-o-meter? It’s obviously not done until it’s edited within an inch of its life. So, I guess I am close to 3/4 done with my 1st draft. and probably 250% more to go on the final draft
Cindy
September 10th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I have yet to find a pedometer accurate enough to suit left-brained, engineering school moi. All the ones I bought tended to err very much on the high side, so I quit using them.
I haven’t installed a word-o-meter on my site for exactly the same reason. I don’t want some gadget telling me I’m almost done when I know full well that I’m miles away!
September 10th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I must be the odd person out…my word meters are almost always correct. Sigh….
What confuses me is that the second draft usually takes me just as long to “complete” as the first draft…now that just doesn’t seem fair.
September 11th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Well, I had to take my “goal meter” down, because let’s just say I underestimated how long it would take to “polish” each chapter. But hey, as long as we keep going, right?
September 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
So that’s where everyone is! Working!
/Lacey crawls back into her lonely hole where there are no word meters at all, broken or otherwise.
September 24th, 2007 at 8:56 am
To me the hardest to write is the end. That’s exactly where I am now and these last 7000 words (the book will run long, so it’s more like 12,000 words) seem to be taking forever to finish. I’m determined it will be by the end of the first week in Oct. I’m giving myself a deadline and that usually works.
September 25th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Yeah, my Revise-O-Meter is its own special work of fiction, too. Once I get to The End, there’s usually more to do at the beginning, which means ripple effecting back to The End again, which causes… excess wine consumption.
You are close, though!! =)
September 26th, 2007 at 1:34 am
I took my page meter down like India. It was too depressing.
I tend to sketch chapters out with very bold strokes and lots of notes like “fill in reaction here.” So in the early stages of a WIP my page meter is completely non-representational of any actual progress toward producing something for eyes other than mine.
Congrats on your progress. I’m following the evolution of Legalese with impatient eagerness, hoping I’ll get to read more some day.