Count is at 28 500. I’m not sure if I should stop this chapter now or not. The chapter is 2k long (that’s on the short side for a chapter), but I feel like I didn’t start what it was supposed to talk about (the escape). Instead, I plunged into the romantic part – that part is supposed to happen in act 2, but I needed some setup. Now, I have 2k words setup and I’ll have to work hard to find reason for my character to escape.

Small corrolary : the first act is going to be way bigger than 30k. More like 35k… Still hope to finish it before new year’s

As today is monday, I got my weekly dose of Writing Excuses. The week’s topic was tragedy. I should point in the website that their topic wasn’t as much tragedy as it was drama. Most of the examples shown were dramatic, not tragedic (except oedipus, of course). As anouilh once said, in drama, you hope for the best until the end (as in romeo and juliet), but in tragedy, you never have any hope, so you can go on spilling your guts. Different types of reader reactions, I think. Tragedy is stong all the way and the end is like a release. For drama, the end is the wrenching part, as Frodo fails to drop the ring in the lava.

I’m the specialist of this discussion since high school 🙂