So... That didn't go well at all. I'm not sure if The Darkness Within just wasn't the right book for this, or if having the ring light and chatroom right in front of me was too distracting or if I just don't have it in me anymore to be writing endlessly. Last time I tried it was before I got into writing seriously, and managed to get 40k words of absolute crap down. This time, I managed to get halfway through chapter five before I was completely braindead.
And it wasn't even my best work. I knew going into this what this book could be. I needed to bring in more plot, rather than just having the main character mooning over the love interest all the time. But that was all I could manage, sitting there staring at the screen past the ring light. The first chapter was dreadfully short, at just 1600 words. The rest of the chapters met quota (2.2k+ on each of them) but quota isn't everything. I'd rather have an 1800 word chapter that's amazing than what I was writing today.
I can do better with this. I will do better than this. I've shuffled my shedule around, removing the writathons for now. My next attempt at writing Darkness Within is next August. I'm not throwing anything out, but I need to let the story jell better. For now, that means taking my time on writing it.
On the plus side, that means I'll be starting to write Cary Simms tomorrow. It means that the second draft of the book will be ready for Jersey Pride, and might be up on Royal Road at that point.
For those of you interested, the videos of my first attempt at a writathon are still on my channel. I won't be downloading them and moving them over to youtube, like I originally planned. But I think I got part of the benefits that I saw in attempting this, getting more visibility in my work and trying to draw readers. In any case, the videos will be up on http://twitch.tv/crowbarella for a few weeks.
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