Thursday, October 30, 2014

Perspective: When counting words began to count.

A few years ago, I decided I needed to go back to school.  Yeah, I was getting old(er) and I thought to myself:  "Hey, You!  You're getting older!  Don't you think you should get an official degree?"

So, terrified beyond measure, I enrolled in the local community college, Valencia, and started on the path to enlightenment--or is that the path to edification?  Anyhow, it had been over 20 years since I last traversed the halls of academia, so I was not too surprised that I failed my math placement tests.

Yeah, I probably could have studied for them, but why bother?  I mean, math and I went way, way back, and we never had a great relationship.  So, I was rather pleased that I'd have to take the remedial math courses in order to carry on to College Algebra.  So I did.  I took two such math courses before any of my math counted towards a degree.  Doesn't seem at all fair, now does it?  Well, I suppose when you're old(er) and not so much wiser in the realm of Quadratic things, it is a necessary evil.

I attacked my general education requirements like a winning team attacks their ice cream sundaes.  Plowing through them until I was left with mostly my chosen degree classes.  Now, my advisor, at the time, warned me that I shouldn't take all those hard paralegal courses together like that.  She said they'd be too much and I had no gen-ed courses to act as a buffer to all the legal classes.  But I was undaunted by her warnings and again, I plowed ahead.

During that time, I was the chairwoman for a local charitable gala, I started homeschooling my daughter, and I still had my mother-wife-daughter duties.

One of the most annoying parts of the program was the requirements that were set forth by the state requiring all students in freshman and sophomore years to complete a minimum of 6,000 words per year.  Oh.  My.  God.  Six thousand words in one year.

I mean, how can one possibly fathom the awful savagery of it all?  Right?  If you are a college student, you feel me.

Of course, those 23 page research papers, the legal briefs, the explications, the speeches, the lit reviews all added up to a whopping SIX THOUSAND--or more--words per year.  Wow.

I thought I was all worded out by the end of those two-and-a-half years.  Yeah, I took over two years to get my paralegal degree.  See the paragraph above where I explain all the other things I was doing at the time!

But I got my degree in Paralegal Studies.  In fact, I graduated with a 4.0.  Then, I decided that I didn't really want to be a paralegal.  I'm more of a creative type of person.  I wanted to just...write.

So, I took a poetry class.  That was fun.  It sparked something in me that had been long-dormant.  It sparked my inner story teller.  It allowed me to just shut up and listen to the voices that are always in my head and give them a voice.

When I began writing Reset, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel.  I thought I had to have all my characters mapped out, the plot clearly diagramed in some weird mapping program, and a set writing schedule.

I had none of those things.

But, I did have the voices.  They wanted to be heard.  Tia Jameson wanted to tell her story.  So, I decided to just let her do that.

Then, one day, my dear friend, Jill, came over and we started discussing the hows and whys and whens of writing a novel.  Ugh.  I don't like that part at all.  She started saying things like:  "You have to get the arc of your novel.  Let's look at word count."

Arc?  Word count?  No...that sounds like work.

So, back to that whole word count thing.  Now I count them, I sure do.  Because that is what publishers and such do.  So, when in Rome...and so on and so forth.

Reset, contained 88,544 words before revisions.  By my rough calculations, that's 14 years worth of 6,000 word requirements!  After revisions and final edits, Reset was 80,068 words.  

The process of writing a novel was...well, very new to me.  One could even say it was...novel.  Ha.  Couldn't help it. :)  But putting it all into perspective, I'd write an 80,000 word novel over ten or twelve essays, explications, or briefs any day old day.

I now spend my days looking at that word counter at the bottom of the page.  I'm still trying to find the arc of my novel.  Maybe it's somewhere under the rainbow?

Perhaps it's waiting for me beside the pot of gold.