Shrinkage

Not the "I jumped into a freezing pool and my nuts are trying to climb inside my body" shrinkage, and not "shoplifting and employee theft" shrinkage. Nope. Something far more insidious. I'm losing word count. (As an aside - my final edits for Love Runes to the proof reader at Torquere. We're looking at a May release. Even better - Chaos Magic AND Love Runes are coming out in print! Yay!) So I've been typing away madly on Personal Demons (working title of the third in the Chaos Magic series) all weekend despite being flu-achey. I began the weekend with a word count over 65,000. I'm at 61,000 now. How can I spend all weekend writing and actually get a negative word count? Well, dears, let me tell you something about writing.... I have a basic plot outline in my head for Personal Demons, but how I get from Point A to Point B is nebulous when I sit down to write. If I were a plotter type, I've have it set in stone, and come hell or high water, my characters would do what they're supposed to do when I determined they'd do it or else. That's not my writing style. On the other hand, I'm not willing to wander into the woods from Point A without a trail of breadcrumbs (a gps, topographical maps, and hiking supplies) in the hopes that if I stumble around long enough, I'll dumb luck my way into Point B. So I headed down a promising path. I was adding word count like crazy. Everything smooth and wonderful and flowing along and I thought, "Geeze, this is going to be a piece of cake this time." Famous last words just before I ran to a cliff. End of the trail. Box canyon. Whatever you want to call it. Somewhere, I'd made a wrong turn and I needed to fix it. I usually have a sense of where things turned bad in a story, which makes me wonder why I didn't stop then and go back, but whatever. Many of the scenes following it depended heavily on the wrong turn, so it wasn't simply a matter of fixing one scene. It cascades through the entire work. Sometimes I try to save as much as I can, but when I'm smart, I give up, delete everything to the end, and start fresh from the head of the new path. So that's how I lost 5,000 words. Don't worry though. This new path I'm on - everything is going smooth, and I'm writing like mad, and it's all flowing so well...