Remember that challenge to write exactly 1667 words a day for May? Now that it’s officially June, I can safely say that challenge didn’t work out quite as planned. Part of the reason behind this was because the nature of my story was writing short stories, and short stories and I don’t get along. Cramming an entire story in so few words is like mowing the lawn with scissors. It can be done, but I really don’t want to do it. Funnily enough, I could have written an entire traditional novel in the amount of time it took me to write these stories. Heck, I could have written two of them.
Then there’s the cowriter factor. The process of bouncing ideas off each other is a great reason for having a cowriter, and the nature of the story gives us good reason to write the two separate pieces of it separately. But despite falling further and further behind, I was still ahead of my cowriter for most of the month, and I could stay only so far ahead. While my pantsing nature works well for novels I’m writing on my own, it works less well when writing with someone else. Even if there’s no huge outline as in our case, staying on the same page (see what I did there?) is extremely important, and that’s what we aimed to do throughout the month even after both of us fell behind.
All this is to say that I didn’t write 50k in May and the story’s not finished. I still wrote almost 30,000 words, so May wasn’t a complete loss. The story will be finished, though. We’ve put too much into the thing to let it languish now.